#everything online... social media is all about consumption and just putting up things for other people to consume

[allthesunlightwecansee]

The (Un)seriousness of My Practice

I just got done watching a short podcast episode on being an unserious witch, and it helped me to articulate some thoughts and feelings that I’ve been having over the past year. About a year ago now, I had a kind of breakthrough where I figured out how to connect with witchcraft and paganism, instead of vaguely calling myself a “person who wishes they were more spiritual,” like I had for several years prior to that. Not to sound like a YA romance novel, but my spiritualism was a slow build up that then hit me all at once that year. As I’m sure a lot of people on Tumblr will relate to, it was a really exciting seven months or so of figuring myself out before life got really stressful and overwhelming, and my spirituality kind of fell to the wayside. However, even during that period of excitement, it wasn’t like I was performing spells every day or doing elaborate rituals and ceremonies like some witches do (though I’m well aware the vast majority do not). Instead, that year involved a lot of reading and learning and altar building, since I am a collector at heart. I think I finally settled into kind of a routine with my spirituality, which I have come to accept, even though it isn’t what I thought it would look like.

Something that I find a bit intimidating about the Internet in general is seeing people who look like they have everything put together. Some practicing witches online clearly do make their whole lives revolve around their practice, particularly those who have turned it into a career via social media or YouTube. That’s a perfectly acceptable way to practice obviously, but it does mean that online spaces tend to feel a little gatekept sometimes when it comes to unserious witchcraft. I would definitely label my practice as being unserious; I rarely create spells at this point, I am very colloquial with the deities that I work with and honor, some of my altars are built almost solely around my need to house certain books (though I am quite deliberate in what deities I create altars for), I enjoy collecting crystals over working spells, and a lot of my spirituality revolves around feeling and the visual, physical objects that I have acquired for my various altars. I can think of several witchcraft Youtubers that I like and whose content I enjoy that would say that I am not a witch because of how I practice, which doesn’t reflect how I actually feel about myself and my practice. For me, spirituality feels more fluid than that. The fact that I create some spells and hold sacred space for my deities still falls under the realm of witchcraft, even though that’s not what works for other people. I have found that having discrete alters for different deities and purposes, makes it easier for me to connect with my spirituality, because I find that adding to altars, lighting, candles, leaving long-term spells, and other forms of magic work better for me personally.

Because of that, while I am not a serious witch in that witchcraft and spirituality do not rule my life, the practice that I do have, however minimal, does fill a gap that was missing in my life. I have also realized that a minimal practice isn’t a bad thing; it’s why their entire podcasts devoted to small magical practices (my favorite is Demystifying Magic), in addition to YouTube channels and accounts that depict serious career witches. It also means that I still keep my other hobbies, and that witchcraft has not become my primary “hobby,” so to speak. I have collected action figures and dolls for over a decade now, which encompasses all of my teenage and adult life. While I know some witches abide by notions of lowering consumption and just generally having a quieter living space, my living space is completely decked out in my various collections, and that hasn’t changed since I pinned down an evolving form of my spirituality. I think some people would see me as incredibly unserious for doing that, but I don’t feel as though one part of myself has to eclipse the other, just because it is more metaphysical in nature. I also know that I have a lot more learning and growing to do in my practice as I figure out what I believe in and what I want to take with me, but I don’t anticipate the physicality of how I practice changing anytime soon. In other words, my unserious practice doesn’t have less value just because it is not elaborate, and I am more secure in that now than I was a few months ago.

#paganism #witchcraft #hellenism #hellenic polytheism #altar #personal

[kedreeva]

I’ve been on tumblr since 2012 and following you pretty much that entire time and have never reblogged or posted a single thing under my name. Before that I was on LJ for years and never posted anything. I send (nice) asks to people on anon, and leave (nice) comments and kudos on ao3. I used to interact some on LJ when anon kink memes were a thing. I am a part of fandom and have been for close to 20 years, I’m just not comfortable having any kind of public persona online that people can see, even if it has no attachment to my real name.

I know that the influx of new, young fans and the way they treat fandom the same as other online content creation/consumption is a problem. But fandom has always had lurkers. I do my best to positively interact in the ways that I am able to within my comfort zone, and I follow the rules of fandom etiquette. There’s so much pushback against lurkers now that was never there before, and I just don’t understand it.

It's a difficult line to walk, but there's a difference between going to a blog that has zero posts, zero likes, no header, no icon, not even a note that says "just lurking," and a person that's here to look at stuff that displays at least enough humanity to say "hey don't block me I'm just looking."

And look... yes there's always been lurkers. And there probably always will be. And it wasn't an issue for you or for creators or fandom in general, because it didn't hurt anything before. In just my living memory, fandom spent a while just being mailing lists- so creations/discussion went to everyone. There wasn't really anyone else to pass stuff on to, so it didn't matter if you just signed up and never said a word. Webrings based the spread of creation in the site itself, because everything was small back then. Livejournal had public and private communities that were searchable and creation was based inside of those communities, and interaction was based on commenting - what you're used to doing, and okay doing - meaning community was based in the comments and people linking to various communities. Back when places like deviantart and ff.net were pretty staple major sites for everyone, community formed in comment sections there as well.

And as much as I do love social media and the advent of community messaging systems... it's changed the face of fandom in ways that make lurking - and I do mean straight up no interaction, if you're sending messages and commenting, you're participating - break the links of community.

Look at it this way:

Back on LJ etc, it didn't matter if you, personally, lurked. Or even if 100 people lurked. Creations and community were centrally located. People all gathered to the same stable location (a post, or a community feed) to look at the things, and comment etc so if you commented or didn't, they could still find the creations. Sites like that brought people together. Now? *shakes head* Social media sites have divided us, and AI/Bots/Algorithms are conquering us because we disseminated too far.

Where do you go, on twitter, if you want to find fic? How do you find a conversation about something? Where do artists go so you can find groups of them and their galleries? You can scroll a tag, but anyone can put anything in that. I have literally no idea how tiktok works because every time I go on it, things just start scrolling past and playing videos for me that I didn't click. It's kind of horrifying. Instagram is... god, I don't even know how to classify that mess, but it's not a community. it's a museum. don't touch anything.

Tumblr is... it's not livejournal, it's not deviantart, it's not mailing lists or webrings but... it's people touching real people still, or it has the ability to be that if we continue to fight for it. As much as there are shitshows around here on occasion, it's still largely neighbors passing notes over the fences separating us.

But for as much community potential as it has, with the way it can function - with the way it USED to function, the way I REMEMBER it functioning a long time ago - it still separates us. There's tags, like on twitter, but anyone that tag dives (like me) knows what a hot fucking mess the tags can be, and there's no other central collection.

Tumblr's saving grace, though, is the ability we, the users, have to interact like humans. To share what we can with one another. To create networks that still kind of resemble the webrings of old, where you can come to one location (someone's blog) and find gateways to other blogs the way one page/site used to lead to the next so the separate, divided things spread across the world WIDE web don't get lost.

Except the link gets broken here, when folks just have empty blogs. There's (thankfully) no algorithm deciding what we should look at, but the trade off is that we have to be responsible for that step in fandom again. The way we used to be.

Not to mention that... there was never really a point for bots back in the LJ days. It would have been hard for them to survive because everyone knew at least some of the people. Not that there weren't, but it was harder and not rewarding for them to exist en masse. Now? Now bots use social media sites and users. Here, on tumblr, they follow accounts to make it look like they're legit to search engines. Whatever central account they're using to scam people, it collects the bots and the network the bots make, and uses them to look legit, so they can scam people, so they can spread viruses, advertise porn or whatever they're doing. They're exploiting users here, and they do this by following us.

And the ONLY recourse we have? is guessing that they're bots and blocking them. Because reporting a blank blog won't get tumblr addressing the issue. So, when someone lurks in a completely faceless, anon way, a way that makes them look like a bot, then the people who are being followed are going to learn to treat them like the bots that are trying to exploit them to do bad things.

And that's not on you! It's not your fault that they're doing those things, or that people have to react the way they have to react to curb that nonsense. And it's not your fault that social media wants to separate us so it can sell us whatever it wants and keep us from communicating and forming communities where we can entertain ourselves instead of feeding on their ads or whatever. It's not your fault that the way community functions on a human level has been backed into a corner by algorithms/bots.

But that IS the lay of the land these days. You and I have both been here long enough that we've watched the landscape shift. It's not the net we knew. And that's unfortunate. But it's probably not going to go back to the way we knew once upon a time. So people are pushing back against folks being quiet, because the alternative is to let algorithms win and do the talking for us. To let bots use us to hurt others. To let fandom founder because it's being directed by whatever AI is in charge of telling us what to look at.

I'm not going to tell anyone they can't be in fandom if they don't reblog stuff or make stuff or whatever. Just... that fandom is going to have a LOT harder time existing in this new breed of divided space if we don't reach out and connect and help one another connect to others, too.

#fandom #tumblr #asks #anon asks #this got long #listen I don't mind people lurking #and you gotta do what you gotta do for your own well being #but it can't be every person #it can't even be most people #or fandom stops existing in these kinds of spaces #because community isn't based on a central space anymore #it's built on our backs and depends on us linking hands #for people to have roads to get around on

[cynicalrecoverysociety]

I've been editing my experiences so much and honestly it has improved my mental health by a lot. I have done it slowly so I didn't realize how different it is now but I basically live in a different world from the one I used to. I am going to share the things I did to turn my internet into a single player game made just for me, and maybe it will help your mental health too!

I downloaded an add on that turns off all comments on basically everything, I turned off tracking on everything I could and reset my phone's ID every week or two so ads are now hilariously random (I know there are still trackers/cookies everywhere but it really does do a lot in terms of ads at least), I have slowly stopped buying from places like Amazon and shien, I block everyone and everything and I have content filters on anything I do. I no longer mindlessly scroll and if I get bored I either read a random Wikipedia page or play minesweeper or other minimalist games (hard ban on phone games with micro transactions). Hard ban on Reddit and other social media. Hard hard hard ban on any comment section, no matter what there will always be something there to piss you off and that is by design. I have also recently changed how I interact with Tumblr and it made me feel way better. No "mandatory" daily stuff and nothing too raw, I genuinely feel the the act of being observed will change the experience so I feel that raw stuff needs to be private (for me) lest I edit my own thoughts for the consumption of others no matter how minor. And finally, anonimizing myself everywhere possible. No face pics, no real names, burner emails and usernames. I know this one especially is not for everyone but removing that connection to myself was very freeing. I was able to say and do things without worrying about how it might impact me if someone saw, and more importantly for me, it freed me of an avenue of unhealthy external validation. I used to find myself very hung up on pictures I would post of myself and feel bad if I didn't get a certain reaction and even posting pictures because I thought they would get a good response or not posting ones I thought no one else would like. I think that comes from a lack of self esteem I have and I found that removing myself from that kind of scrutiny let me find confidence in myself and my appearance again.

So yeah! I know it's kinda rambling but over the course of the past year or two I've really started to find the boundaries that serve me and it turns out all that stuff was, to put it lightly, a complete vibe killer. There was a lot of other stuff I did for mental/physical health that also really helped but my online experiences were a shockingly huge part of that. It took a long time to get here but I really like it. I don't compare half as much, I'm much more mindful of my time, my self talk is better, and I have a lot more confidence in myself. I hope that if you read this far you find a tip or two that might help you! Good luck on your journey!

#mental health #fitspo #fitspiration

[adarlingwrites]

Muse

Summary:

You're a frustrated and starving artist, disillusioned with the world you move in. Transported to a new one, you unexpectedly find a muse.

Notes:

Last Boss/Artist!Reader. Protagonist is AFAB. Oneshot, explicit smut.

I just wanted to write something short, sweet, and self-indulgent because damn, I need a break. And um, our favorite tiger boy needs more love.

Your mind was in a dark place when everything changed.

No galleries had contacted you to put up your works there. Your art blog’s viewership is abysmal, all your commissions are still unfinished, and your bank account has dried up. Such is the life of the struggling young artist; no money, no connections, and no talent, as some may think.

Every piece brought from you is something you’re grateful for. Every like, share and comment you receive is something you treasure. And yet, when you see another artist garner more attention just because what they do is trendy, or because they have connections, you can’t stop the resentment from filling up your heart.

These days, your works can’t just speak for themselves. Art is becoming a game, a competition for who gets the most paintings bought from a show, or the most number of likes within a platform.

You hate the galleries. Most of the time, they’re boys’ clubs reserved for old, mediocre men whose swelling egos are easier to rile up than their dicks. They sell their paintings at ludicrous prices, market value inflated by the connections they have to the gallery and the pretentious bullshit they write in the descriptions.

You hate social media. You hate the algorithm, you hate how these online venues to share your work is geared in another’s favor. You’ve tried to play the game for so long, posting at peak hours and sharing your work shamelessly to your friends, but nothing seems to be working. 

You’re envious.

Envy is such an ugly thing.

Galleries rouse it within the small, unseen artist, whose talents are hidden due to their lack of privilege, their lack of name. Social media capitalizes on it, thriving on competition, the number game warping a person’s psyche and perception of their worth.

Curling up in a ball in your bed, you’ve contemplated countless times if playing the game is still worth it. You just can’t keep up anymore. Each stroke of your brush and glide of your pen had your soul weaved in them, and no one seems to appreciate that because it’s not something anyone can put a price tag on.

Sighing, you drag your feet to the convenience store to buy yourself dinner with what little money you have left.

Then you saw it, the fireworks.

Life turned upside down for you within the span of hours.

Weeks later, you’re in a place called the Beach and sitting as far away as possible from the pool, sketching away on your notebook, odd ends of paper sticking out from it. You’ve survived another harrowing game, and you’re trying to wind down with a nice sketch session.

In this world, there’s no galleries, no social media. There’s no people to impress or market yourself to; just survival. There’s no money to be earned to keep living in this world, just visa days. Days of worrying if anything you’d create is worthy of anyone’s attention is replaced by the need to keep forging forward. But still, to keep yourself sane, you carried around pencils and paper, drawing and sketching whatever your heart desired.

In this world, your art is just for your own consumption, entertainment, and respite. Instead of being the thing that kept you up at night, it became something that saved you from the madness of this world.

The blaring music stopped, sound abruptly cut off as the speakers crashed.

Aguni’s militants have arrived, it seems. Per the advice of another Beach resident, you’ve done your best to steer clear of them. Yet, you still couldn’t stop yourself from getting involved with one of them, the one with the tattoos on his face and all over his body.

The first time you saw him, you found his appearance striking. The facial tattoos he had made him look tiger-like, and the katana he carries around with him just adds to the dangerous air he had about him. The fact that he almost always wears his hood up and the fact that he barely speaks add to the mystery surrounding him.

You’ve learned that nobody, not even their chief, knows his true name. They just call him Last Boss, because he looks like the last boss of a videogame.

It started innocently enough. You sketched him on your notebook, tall and wiry stature contrasting with the flow of the loose clothing he wears. Then the sketches multiplied the more you saw him in the games, and in the Beach. You’ve drawn him wielding his sword and finishing an assailant off. You’ve drawn him squatting on the balcony railing, surveying the Beach during his patrols.

Last Boss had filled your sketchbook pages. He became your muse.

Maybe it’s because he stood out to you, or it’s the sheer, unapologetic boldness his tattoos have. Either way, you were intrigued by him. Sometimes, you swore he’d stare at you back, but as soon as you look at him again, he’s looking someplace else. The little game you played thrilled you, thighs rubbing together when you see him. You’d be lying if you said that you didn’t have impure thoughts about him; you’ve wondered just how much of his skin is covered by tattoos.

And yet, neither of you had spoken a word to each other.

It was your little secret.

But not for long.

In the lobby, you were heading back to your room after dinner to rest when you ran into one of the militants. He barked at you to watch where you’re going, and stomped away. The collision sent your notebook flying, paper scattering across the floor. Scrambling to collect them all, you crawled to find every single piece, only to bump into someone’s shins.

It’s your muse, Last Boss, and he’s found a page of your sketchbook.

“I- um, that’s mine. Thank you picking it up, I’d like to have it-”

The words left you when you realize that he’s looking at your sketch of him.

His eyes flick to you.

“Back.”

You gulped, unsure of how he would react to it. Wordlessly, he gives you back the piece of paper, and you nod at him, proceeding to pick up the rest of the pages. Embarrassed, you hurry back to the room you’ve occupied, and shut the door. Not like it would make a difference; all the locks are superglued, but it still provided you some relief.

A warm bath would be nice. It’ll definitely help melt the stress of today away.

Stripping, you entered the bathroom, soaping and rinsing the grime away as the tub filled with water. The splashing echoed in the room, and the bass pounded outside as the party raged on, making you deaf to other sounds that might register in your ears under quieter conditions.

You get in the tub, warm water soothing your sore muscles from the Spade game you participated in earlier, and your eyelids flutter shut. Engulfed by warmth, you drift off to sleep.

After an unknown amount of time, you awaken abruptly to the sound of footsteps in your room.

Quiet as a ghost, you listened carefully. The footsteps stopped, and springs creaking as a weight sat down on your bed followed after. After that, you hear the gentle rustle of paper.

As quietly as possible, you get out of the tub, reaching for a towel and wrapping it around your torso. Pushing the door open as slow as possible, you peer out of the bathroom to see who’s the intruder, and what you saw made your heart jump to your throat.

Last Boss is sitting at the edge of your bed, peering at your sketchbook. With uncharacteristic gentleness, he thumbs through the pages of the hardbound notebook, enthralled by the strokes you made on the paper. There were self-portraits, landscapes, portraits of people, figure drawing, and of course, some of them had him as the subject. Engrossed by the art, he doesn’t notice you.

Taking off the bathroom slippers, you walk barefoot, stepping out of the bathroom as quietly as possible. You were making good progress, inching away from the door, but your foot landed on a piece of paper, and you slipped.

With a thud, you land on your ass on the floor. The tattooed militant stands up abruptly, drawing his sword.

“Oh God, please don’t hurt me,” you yelp, one hand holding the towel around your chest into place, the other shielding yourself from him.

He sees you, then he lowers the sword, and tucks it away. Last Boss walks over, and you screw your eyes shut, but there was no pain that followed. His wiry fingers grasped your forearm and helped you get up.

“Thank you,” you whispered, averting his gaze. He towered over you, almost a full foot taller. You move to retrieve your sketchbook on the bed, but he doesn’t let you go. Gaze finally meeting his, you found yourself disarmed by the intensity of his eyes.

“W-what do you need?” you ask him, the tremble in your voice apparent. You’re still gauging his reactions. So far, he hasn’t done anything to hurt you, but he’s a militant. They don’t exactly have a track record for being gentle.

“You’re good. But you drew my tattoos wrong,” he finally speaks.

Eyes wide, you didn’t know how to respond, blurting out something incoherent. Then, you try to compose yourself. “Sorry. I never had the chance to look at you up close.”

“Would you like to?”

Breath hitching in your throat, you nod. “Let me just get dressed,” you say to him, but he still doesn’t let you go, eyes boring into yours. Behind his tattoos are delicate, handsome features that knocked the air out of your lungs. What stood out the most are his lips, small and well-formed, looking too soft for a man as dangerous as him.

Then you understood what he wanted.

Because you want it too.

You let go of the towel, leaving yourself exposed. But he stands there, frozen, as if he didn’t expect things to go his way.

Leaning in, you kiss him, wet body pushing against him, soaking his clothes. It started slow, and sweet, but then you experimentally dart your tongue out, and he lets out a low growl, opening his mouth to receive you.

It was sloppy and inexperienced, but the kiss hit the spot. You feel the fire pooling in your belly, pleasure shooting up your spine.

Throwing caution to the wind, you put your arms around him and his movements become more desperate, kneading and squeezing at your naked flesh, pawing greedily at every inch of skin he can get his hands on.

You toss your sketchbook to the bedside table and you hop on, pulling Last Boss with you.

Straddling him, you grind your hips against his, and he’s already hard under his trousers, making you smile against his lips as you kiss him more. Your hands guided his to your ass, and you pushed your chest against his face. Last Boss eagerly buries his face between the soft mounds of your breasts, and proceeds to latch on a nipple, hard from the cool night air.

You let out a soft moan, hands cradling his neck as he assaulted you with his lips and mouth. He unlatches from the nipple, then proceeds to leave kisses all over your neck.

Then, he lies back, and he pulls you over him, his head between your thighs.

“Are you sure?” you ask him, a little bashful because of his view of your body.

He nods, and he proceeds to lick your folds, making you gasp in pleasure.“Aim for the nub,” you instruct him with a soft voice, and he does as he says, licking at your clit with abandon. You rode his face as he licked you, movements sloppy.

Soon, you were reaching your peak and you braced yourself against the headboard. Thighs quivering, you came with a cry, riding his face as you climaxed, tits bouncing as your body shook.

As you come down from your high, abruptly, Last Boss flips you over, and now you’re underneath him.

“Don’t you want me to return the favor?” you ask him, smirking.

“Next time. I want you now,” he half-whispers, half-growls. The hard member pressing against you tells you that he’s serious.

You nod at him, and he proceeds to unfasten his belt, hands shaking from nervousness, or excitement, you didn’t know. It’s probably both.

He went in with a single thrust and you can’t hold back the cry that bubbled in your throat. Fortunately for you, you were wet enough for it not to hurt, but it still caught you off guard. He was slender, but that length… it made your toes curl.

Erratic and inexperienced, you had to guide him with his thrusts, and soon, Last Boss finds a steady rhythm, those penetrating eyes looking deep into you as you brushed the tattoo on his cheek with your thumb. You hook one ankle over his shoulder, and moan as the new angle allowed him to penetrate you deeper. Last Boss bottoms out, and he groans, rutting deep inside you.

You raise another ankle and pull him closer, and he’s pressed flush against you, hips desperately pounding away. The tattooed militant pins your arms above you and kisses you, tongues sliding against each other as filthy noises of your fucking filled the room. You suck on his earlobe, and whispers filthy, filthy things in his ear.

“You know, I’d been thinking about this for a while now,” you whisper, and he tilts his head.

“I always imagined you breaking into my room and just fucking me raw until I’m a mess,” you continue, and it seemed to spur him on, thrusts becoming more frantic as the seconds passed. “I’d never thought I’d get lucky tonight. Fuck, Last Boss, use me as you wish, I’m all yours!”

Last Boss didn’t need to be told twice. He fucked you at a brutal pace, sharp hips colliding with the soft skin of your thighs, and with a broken cry, you cum once again, your walls milking his cock.

“Please, please, fill me with your cum!” you cry as he continued.

It drove him over the edge. Soon after, he follows, coming with a loud groan. His body collapses on you, and he gives you another kiss, still sloppy, but it almost felt tender, something you didn’t expect from the sword-wielding militant.

The tattooed man lies next to you, and you curl into him, tracing his tattoos with your fingers.

“Can I look at more of your sketchbook tomorrow morning?” he asks, voice low and drowsy.

You smile, looking up to him. “Sure.”

Just when you’re about to drift to sleep, he speaks again. “Takatora. My name is Takatora.”

Smiling, you kiss his cheek, and say your name in return. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Last Boss is your muse. His attention, both to your body and your creations, is all you need.

#alice in borderland #imawa no kuni no alice #imawa no kuni no arisu #last boss #takatora samura #last boss x reader #artist!reader #smut #fluff #fluff and smut #fanfic: muse #don't mind me just pouring my frustrations in this fic

[universitypenguin]

What happened to u? U okay?

Hello!

First off, thank you for your concern. I appreciate it and I needed it after the past two days. To answer your question - I'm doing great.

I don’t have a lot of context about your question, but I’m guessing your concern is due to my recent blocking spree. A day ago, I went through my followers list and found some minors. I’ve previously seen smut fanfic writers concerned by underage people interacting with their posts. Until I had to block a few of them, I wasn’t aware how uncomfortable it would make me feel.

Since the blocking spree, I've had a lot of thoughts. I'm about to spew them everywhere. You might regret asking me if I was okay. Sorry about that. No one needs to read this whole manifesto about my rollercoaster of emotions the past few days. But in the interest of transparency, I'm posting this very long note.

What I want my readers to know is the following:

Tumblr is both a place for fanfiction and a social media site.

When I interact with followers and write explicit content, I have to be careful about what I'm saying and who I'm saying it to.

I don't intend to block or purge my followers in the future.

As long as I appropriately tag and put warnings on my work, that is adequate protection for my blog. Everything I write containing explicit content is tagged.

However, I won't interact with users who don't have an age stated in their bio.

There have to be boundaries, given the content of my writing. But I've also come around to the realization that I'm not capable of policing every interaction. Tumblr is a public forum. Minors following me makes me uncomfortable. But by the same token, my work is clearly labeled at 18+ and so is my blog.

There's a lot of explicit content out there for minors if you really think about it. In my high school freshman English class we talked about the book "The Color Purple." Believe me, that was explicit and we were only 14. Any minor with a library card and a Google browser can access a lot more intense content than what I write. I hope they're all being safe, but I can't have a melt down blocking spree again.

I'm not a cop, I'm not a parent, and what minors consume is down to them and the adult responsible for them. If I know someone is a minor I'll block them, should I notice they're trying to interact with me. Otherwise, I'm not purging my followers ever again. It's too much drama. I'd rather leave Tumblr than do that twice. I'm tired and I'm starting to work on my post graduate classes, I work full time in a demanding job, I'm in the process of editing my novel, and trying to keep up with my personal life. Quite literally, I don't have time to block. Writing fanfic is supposed to be my fun time. Let's keep it that way.

Due to the fact that some people I blocked were later unblocked after I took a closer look at their blogs, I'm posting a full explanation below. A quick summary is this:

After only writing for three months, I'd amassed 500 followers. On Monday I blocked almost 200 of them. Then I reviewed my block list and editing down some people who were prematurely blocked. [I assume the anon is one of the unblocked who had me disappear from their dash. Sorry!] This blocking thing isn't sustainable. In the future I'll run my blog differently as far as interaction goes in an effort to be responsible.

Continue reading for the saga of:

The Great Blocking Spree and Existential Crisis of an Erotic Fanfic Writer.

The Blocking Spree:

On Monday I realized a thirteen year old was following me and interacting with my work. This creeped me out.

*Commence blocking spree*

Then I realized how daunting my followers list was. I had 500 followers prior to Monday. That day I blocked about 200 people (some of them prematurely - more on that later.) So after the daunting task of trying to assume, to check bios for ages, to review blog content and determine the user's age, I was tired. Today, I even took a moment to reconsider if I wanted to use Tumblr. Because if all this is my responsibility, maybe I don't have the time or dedication to manage it. When I can be chill, I try to be. This attitude also affected by blocking. It contributed to me unblocking people. When I was doing the blocking spree, I'd give people with no age in their bio a fair shot by reviewing their posts.

I blocked some bot accounts, then a bunch of blank blogs, some ambiguous people who very well could be of age. For the first 100 followers I was pretty aggressive. Then my attention span dropped off and I was a bit more ambivalent. I realized I was doing a crappy job of moderating and wondered what the point was.

The point was that the thirteen year old interacting with my work freaked me out. When I found two sixteen year old followers, it pushed me to continue the purge.

So on I go, blocking. I'm so responsible for doing this, right? But my methodology is crap. What is context for being an adult? Someone had posted about budgeting advice. I thought the budgeting advice was too good for it not to have come from an adult. But my father's a financial advisor and to be honest, I could have given that level of advice at fifteen just from osmosis. Someone had pictures of themselves entering their marijuana plants in the Oregon State Fair. Okay, you've got to be over 18. I didn't block them. Someone else complained about their stats professor and I didn't block them. But in retrospect, one of my high school friends got permission to take college level math courses when we were seniors. She was seventeen when she had a stats professor. The thought circles back - what am I accomplishing here? Next, I went back and unblocked someone who ranted about her Tinder matches being 60 year old men. I wondered if their post was even real. I've lied on the internet before. Nonetheless, I persisted and worked through all 500 followers. When I was done I had 312 followers left.

Post Blocking Spree Existential Crisis:

I know that all the blocking in the world can't stop a teenager who wants to read smut fanfic. I'm not much for posting on social media and I'm not used to a lot of anonymous interaction online. Honestly, I got rid of my SM accounts during college when I felt it was wasting my time. This is the first time I've really use a social media site to post content since college. My twitter account is unused, my Instagram is for close personal friends only, and my TikTok is for mindless consumption of cat videos. (I've trained the algorithm to feed me only cat videos, it's great and I highly recommend it.) I don't post on TikTok, so I don't consider it full use, just lurking.

Okay, Alice, get back to the point....

Right, being anonymous on social media. My blocks are a fence and it's based on self identification from the blogs that follow me. I have little faith in underage consumers to out themselves. I have even less faith in their honesty or respect for an adult's boundaries. They're at a stage in life where they want to push the boundaries. Telling them no is all but inviting them in. I did my blocking spree because I was worried about backlash from someone's parents. But what reasonable judge would come after a fanfic writer? Come on. Logical thoughts but me emotional distress was still brewing.

Why I am the one responsible for who clicks the follow button on my blog? I've always clearly identified what I write and tagged my work as smut.

That thought snapped me out of my whirlwind of anxious thoughts. So I started looking into the laws. My regular work involves medicine, not the legal profession, so I was lost. I found some state level laws that made me glad I'd gone on a blocking spree. California and Florida have specific language in their laws about 'providing minors with explicit content.' But what exactly is that? What I researched applied to the following activities: co-writing smut fanfic with other people, sexting, roleplaying and online messaging.

I run a fanfic blog with limited interaction. I've never done an ask. I don't roleplay on here and I don't want to.

The blocks weren't personal. They were partly based on the awareness that Tumblr is an interactive site and a place that's had a problem with child pornography in the past. But I'm not the smut police. I suck at blocking, and I doubt I did a good job of purging my followers list. This is when it hit me that boundaries are only what I can enforce. They've never been about how other people relate to me, only how I relate to them. (Wow. I've never sounded more like my mother in my life...) After this thought, I started considering what actions I ought to take if I wanted to keep posting fanfic on Tumblr.

My Post Blocking Spree Clarity...

It's up to me who I interact with. I don't have to reply to every comment and re-blog, but I'd like to. I'm stuck between wanting to write for everyone and handling interactions on a social media site that's mostly anonymous.

The fact remains: I can't be the smut police because I suck at it.

What I've decided is that I'll make it very clear on my blog that this is an 18+ space where I publish erotic fanfiction. Smut will always be appropriately marked. I'm not going to interact with reviews, re-blogs, and messages from accounts who don't have their age in their profile. I won't include them in my tag list either. The internet is a public forum. Just as with publishing erotica, once it's out there online for download, it's done. As a ghost writer and an author, I don't control who buys my original fiction, which is just as spicy as my fanfiction. (Trust me, it's explicit. I once had a romance editor tell me I should dial it back on the smutty parts of a novel because "it's a lot of sex for a non-erotica market.") The key difference on Tumblr is about interaction. And that's something I can control. I can decide when I reply to other users. What brought me around to this was the realization that even after the blocking spree, I can't review every single like I get. That's an amount of time and mental energy that's beyond me. Just the past two days have been exhausting and sapped my will to write. Which sucks because I need to go write the next chapter of "Restitution" before tomorrow.

I think the reasons I went on the blocking spree are nuanced. The thirteen year old freaked me out. So did the other underaged people who had ages in their bios. But it also relates to my work. In my job I've seen some nasty child abuse cases. Early on in my career, when I was a 23 year old new hire, I was working on an autopsy for a child abuse victim who'd been murdered by their parent. It was so terrible and graphic, I had to ask one of my older colleagues to take the case. This colleague didn't like me. But she took one look at my face and took the file. She closed out the review without a question and never brought it up again to anyone. I was very grateful. Where I used to work (and where this incident took place) was a major city that holds the unfortunate title of being the human trafficking capital of the US. And something I learned working there was that most human trafficking victims go with their captors willingly. In two years at that job, I never saw one who'd been kidnapped from a dark alley like you see on TV. They were all groomed on social media and thought they were escaping their families (who were often overbearing, toxic, or dysfunctional) for a get away with friends. It was a fun adventure with their internet buddies, until it wasn't.

In retrospect, the underage interaction I found on my blog made me react because of what I've been through. The autopsy case kept coming back to me today while I was at work and I've finally untangled my emotions enough to figure out what caused my melt down. When I was blocking, I was feeling an anxious motivation that I know can only stem from the stress I deal with at my job. Don't feel sorry for me about this - I know my work in medicine helps a lot of people and it's a tremendously satisfying career.

Our Saga's Resolution & How I'm Going to Deal With This In The Future...

- - - - -

In post block clarity, I offer this conclusion:

I'm writing on a public forum. My work is appropriately tagged as smut. In the future, I will also use the tag #no minors to help with filtering. I've always asked underage people not to interact. And on a public forum, what more can I reasonably do? Going forward I will only interact with those who have their age posted in their bio. But blocking sprees and policing every interaction isn't feasible.

I'll review how I'm going to run my tag lists as well. I need to think it over and let my followers know my decision as to if I'll continue using them. Because tagging is definitely interaction and my current tag list was not screened at all. *face palm*

Finally, to my readers who have blank blogs or don't have an age listed. I respect your right to privacy and I'm careful with my personal information as well. But I've also had an uncomfortable two days. If you've lasted through this venting session until now, you must understand that I'm upset by underage interaction. I'm setting my own boundaries and going forward, I'll own my side of the internet. No interaction from me, unless I know your age. Full stop - no exceptions. I think it is reasonable for me to suggest that you leave something on your blog that signifies you are not a minor, whatever that may be. Someone who I didn't block that stands out in my memory had a bio that said "90s baby." It was simple, direct, and left no doubt they were over 18. No age reveal and not even a name. If you put something like this on your blog it'll help explicit content creators feel more comfortable about their interactions.

I went on a spree this Monday and I admit to being heavy handed and aggressive about pruning followers. I had an emotional reaction due to work stress and I didn't think things through logically. I'm relieved for the chance explain myself and set new boundaries that I'm capable of sticking to in the future. But remember - the block button is on my side of the screen. At the end of the day, you might be unhappy with me for the block, but it's my button, it's my blog, and I'll use it as I see fit.

Thank you for reading.

#tw vent #tw child abuse #tw trauma #tw violence #tw human trafficking #penguin blog update #new rules #i'm sorry #its been a long week #I almost left tumblr over this #blocking spree #clarity #smut #no minors #smut fanfiction #smut writing #smut blog #I talk about my work trauma from medicine #boundaries

[antoine-roquentin]

The popular conception of chivalry, as a moral code guiding the behavior of honorable knights, is flat-out, laughably wrong. That’s a creation of 19th-century authors like Walter Scott, and the popular fantasy authors (basically up until George R.R. Martin) who built on their worldview in the 20th.

In reality, chivalry was all about one particular version of Guys Being Dudes. Chivalry could refer to a few different things, but the most common meaning was simply battlefield deeds, executed with some style. This, what knights referred to as “prowess,” was at the core of the broader ideology of chivalry: raw, bloody, physical performance, violence done effectively and to an agreed-upon aesthetic standard. The second major concern of chivalry, honor, grew directly out of the first. Honor wasn’t an abstract concept to medieval knights; it was a possession, a recognition of their particular status and place in the social hierarchy, which they were well within their rights to violently defend and assert through their prowess. Piety was the icing on the cake, but no knight really doubted that God approved of their actions.

An oral culture, passed around during training sessions and drinking bouts and feasts and military campaigns, produced this culture and inculcated new knights into it. A whole universe of texts, the kinds of things knights read or had read to them, sent the same message, like this 12th-century poem called Girart de Vienne:

When I see the whinnying war-steeds plunge

With worthy knights into a battle’s crush,

And see their spears and cutting blades well struck,

There is nothing on earth I love so much!

These were dudes who loved getting after it, and for them, getting after it meant blood-soaked deeds on the battlefield. It’s not that there was nothing more to it - sure, there were some bits about romance and ladies, debates about religiosity and moral actions, exhortations to do better - but the core was always physical, male violence. And it obviously wasn’t for everyone: Knights were members of a hereditary military aristocracy, and their possession of chivalry was what set them apart from dirty peasants.

Two aspects neatly parallel modern Bro Culture: first, the emphasis on physicality and the body, and how that provided both a sense of the self and secured social status; and second, the restricted, bubble-like world that produced and emphasized it, with its fictional and real heroes, its stories about great deeds, its values, and its models to be emulated. Your average knight would absolutely identify with and appreciate this impossibly toxic meathead sentiment:

Obviously, there are pieces that don’t neatly parallel, the biggest ones being the hereditary and explicitly military nature of chivalry. You don’t have to be a soldier to be a Bro, though it doesn’t hurt. And - much more important - you aren’t born into being a Bro; you become one, by doing worthy deeds of prowess.

That’s a quintessentially American value: the idea that anybody can make something of themselves if they work hard enough, move enough weight, run fast enough, practice enough to shoot a tight grouping, make the right sacrifices. The physical meritocracy (and its potential rewards of fame and fortune) is open to anyone willing to do whatever it takes to climb the ladder. Even the least intellectually gifted meathead can make something of himself if he does the workouts, takes the right gear, and builds his audience on YouTube and Instagram. Don’t forget to like and subscribe, and smash that follow button.

In a moment of stagnant social mobility, rising inequality, and incredible uncertainty around the future, this strongly visual message of self-betterment and improving one’s socioeconomic status through literal sweat can resonate deeply. It’s all within the individual’s control, if they simply work enough - an antidote to all that uncertainty, everything that’s so obviously beyond an individual’s control and reckoning, no matter how misleading and incomplete the formula actually is.

That’s especially appealing to the many millions of American men who don’t have college degrees (many more of them than women, given the gendered trends in undergraduate enrollment) who are effectively locked out of professional-managerial culture and its straightforward path into the comfortable upper-middle class. Accomplishment through physical prowess is thus a means of building both a sense of self and community.

The connections to this particular moment in American culture and history go much deeper than that, though. This whole edifice of Bro Culture grows out of the broader rise of influencers, performative self-branding through social media, and the construction of identity through consumption.

With the right protein powder, shilled by your favorite strongman, you too can deadlift 800 pounds, or at least tell yourself you’ll get there someday. With the right brand of CBD tincture, which sponsors your favorite Crossfit athlete, you won’t feel that burning pain in your rotator cuff after you clean and jerk too much weight with suboptimal technique. By religiously listening to the right Bro-approved entrepreneurship podcast, hosted by some guy who happened to get booked on the Joe Rogan Experience during a slow week, you too can buy a McMansion in an affordable suburb.

Much of what happens in Bro Culture is driven by lifestyle consumption: ads for sunglasses on Barstool Sports’ Pardon My Take podcast, brand partnerships between supplement companies and YouTube stars, tactical holsters for concealed-carry that an ex-Marine with a million Instagram followers wants you to buy. It’s self-actualization through sponsor codes.

The tactical lifestyle craze, a natural outgrowth of this particular slice of Bro Culture, is the logical endpoint of all this. It’s where entrepreneurial late capitalism and influencer trends meet imperial wars, the militarization of the police, and the emergence of Gun Guys as a default protected class within American society. You’re not a Crossfitter anymore; you’re a “tactical athlete,” doing varied types of interval, cardio, and strength training so you can be a more effective soldier or cop or firefighter or whatever, or you just want to feel like you could be one. The physical training is only part of this, since you can prominently declare your tactical affiliations with a variety of lifestyle products, ranging from coffee mugs to American flag stickers for your car to, naturally, firearms....

Just as much as its coffee, whose quality I can’t speak to, Black Rifle Coffee Company is selling the tactical lifestyle. They offer a staggering variety of T-shirts, hoodies, hats, mugs, thermoses, and stickers, many of them prominently branded with the eponymous “black rifle” of the brand. There are a lot of American flags and pieces of law-enforcement and military iconography, signifiers of the in-groups to whom the consumers of BRCC’s products belong, want to belong, or for whom they want to signal their support. BRCC has explicitly labeled itself as a coffee company for conservatives, an active participant in the culture wars. If you don’t like Starbucks and its effete, refugee-supporting, liberal tendencies, buy some Black Rifle product instead. If you like Trump, you’ll be at home with BRCC. Don Jr. endorsed them.

After the picture of Rittenhouse in the Black Rifle Coffee Company shirt appeared, its founder Evan Hafer quickly disavowed the youthful shooter. Even for an explicitly MAGA coffee company, supporting a teenaged AR enthusiast with blood on his hands was a bridge too far. But Rittenhouse had already been shaped by the world BRCC and its fellow-travelers have made. He got the message, loud and clear: You too can become a hero, or at least dress and drink coffee like one, by purchasing the right products, watching the right videos, and following the same Extended Bro Culture influencers. Don’t forget to like and subscribe.

The Veteran-owned piece of BRCC’s appeal isn’t a coincidence. They’re selling a position in the culture wars, a sense of belonging, but also a particular vision of what it means to be American, a man, and an American man. A staggering number of this part of Bro Culture’s key figures are veterans. Jocko Willink, perhaps the best known (and least openly political) of the bunch, was a Navy SEAL officer; he was actually the commanding officer of the famous sniper Chris Kyle during the Battle of Ramadi in 2006.

After retiring, Willink turned his SEAL experience into a career as a leadership consultant, motivational speaker, media personality, and energy drink salesman. His intensity, built on his military service, is legendary: His exhortations to do hard things regularly, to live by a code, and take responsibility for oneself, resonate with millions of people. And Willink is far from the only one to do so, turning overseas service in imperial wars, especially as a special forces operator, into a key component of his entrepreneurial appeal. This isn’t a judgement on his military service; it’s a statement of fact. Being an undeniable badass is a the core part of why Jocko Willink is a quintessential Bro Hero.

Imperial wars overseas always come home eventually, and they do so in complex ways. The fact that millions of people listen to Jocko Willink, buy Black Rifle Coffee Company merchandise, and dabble in more extreme fringes is a product of decades spent elevating not just military service writ large but violent combat overseas against ill-defined Others. For every Jocko Willink, there’s an Eddie Gallagher, the SEAL who was convicted of and then recently pardoned for war crimes after becoming a cause célèbre for large swathes of the online right.

If these are the heroes Bro Culture puts forth - special operators accustomed to high-intensity, high-volume fighting overseas, who then develop enormous media platforms - it’s obvious what message Kyle Rittenhouse and the innumerable police officers, tactical fitness enthusiasts, and more run-of-the-mill viewers and listeners will take. Millions of people listen to Joe Rogan when he talks to Jocko Willink, Tim Kennedy (the Green Beret and MMA fighter and increasingly open right-wing figure), or Cameron Hanes (who advocated for Eddie Gallagher’s release). They’re warriors. Joe Rogan isn’t a soldier, but he’s a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, a former competitive kickboxer, a bowhunter, and a firearms enthusiast. If these are the people at the core of Bro Culture, a culture that directly touches tens of millions of American men, then there are bound to be knock-on effects. If they’re constantly telling their listeners to be ready, to be tactical, to be prepared to fight and to be good at it, that means something.

This is why I think Bro Culture, or at least its extended reaches, deserve more scrutiny and attention. The code of American manhood that’s developing out of this social-media melting pot has some aspects that bear watching: A love of firearms centered on tactical usefulness (for use in what context, exactly?), a vision of muscular physicality, self-defense as a personal obligation, an unquestioning hero-worship of military culture, and far too often, a deep suspicion of people who don’t subscribe to this precise view of being a guy. Support the Troops, and if you don’t, you’re not really a man at all. If cops - quintessential subjects of Bro Culture - are told that they need to be bigger and stronger and quicker on the draw, that they’re basically Troops, and that the targets of violence deserve what they get, what’s the likely outcome of tense interactions between police and the people they’re supposed to serve?

[awed-frog]

Do you have any advice for someone who’s really struggling to study? I’m really stressed and demotivated, and I can’t seem to sit down and just study. In my country we only have virtual classes so maybe It has something to do with that, it’s really sad that it’s my first college year and I haven’t attended one single face to face class. Anyway, If you have any kind words I would really appreciate it. Love your blog btw <3

Hey! Thank you for this! And I’m very sorry you feel that way...just know you’re not alone, I think we’re all a bit ‘what’s the point’ rn, and for students (and teachers) this period must suck especially hard. I don’t know exactly what can work for you, but here are a few things that come to mind. I hope you can find something useful!

Have habits and routines. Our days are all over the place, which is not good for motivation or mental health. Instead of procrastinating, feeling guilty, working in a hurry and then feeling even worse, decide on a schedule that works for you. Don’t be too hard on yourself - give it as much time as you need to do the work well, and devote the rest of your day to stuff that makes you feel accomplished and serene (maybe learn or practice a non-screen skill, such as cooking or painting?).

And: at risk of sounding like a yoga mom, don’t forget about your body. Very often stuff like bad mood or exhaustion has physical, not mental, causes. Try to make time for sport - dancing in your underwear, running outside, walking the dog, online pilates, a 7-minute app - and, if you can, a few minutes of meditation, singing or breathing exercises every day. I’d recommend the ‘cardiac coherence’ stuff - lasts about 3 minutes, makes you feel really great. And: remember to stretch, smile and drink water throughout the day. If possible, go outside or have plants and flowers around you.

When it comes to habit, try to understand what kind of person you are and react accordingly. Some people work best when they change cold turkey (new day, new me), while for others it’s better to adjust things more slowly (for instance by moving the alarm clock forward five minutes every week or two). If you’re the second type, a method like Pomodoro could work well to organize your work schedule. 

Have pretty things. Try switching to ink or coloured pens, have nice stationery, organize your Word documents so they’re neat and tidy, use candles, plants, ‘good mood’ incense - whatever makes you feel your work has meaning and worth.

Try background music. Some people work better with noise, and you can find all kind of noises online, from stations to coffee shops to purring cats. Others like classical music. For me, what works is video game music, which is designed to keep you alert and focused while being unobtrusive.

Try to keep your workspace as similar as possible to a ‘real’ workspace. No stack of dirty mugs and plates, no abandoned pajama bottoms. If you can manage it, start your day as if you were actually going outside - dress for actual human company, put on make-up if you like to - and remember to prepare your desk the night before: textbooks, charged laptop, notebooks, water bottle, possibly a diary or a motivational quote or anything you find useful.

If it helps, study with friends or classmates. Have video meetings, chats or shared Google docs and work together. Rant with people who’re going through the same thing, but also find a way to help one another. If you live with flatmates or family members, maybe you can find a moment to work together on your separate things? Dad does admin, mom prepares a work presentation, you do your homework and that’s ‘work time’ for everyone?

Divide your tasks. Make clear lists of what you have to do - as detailed as possible (not: shakespeare essay, but: 1. read book, 2. write essay, 2b. introduction and so on) and pay attention to when the stuff is due, either writing it down in agendas or post-its or creating alerts on your phone. Some people also like the square of doom (you know, that ‘important + urgent’, ‘important + non urgent’ thingy).  

Keep track of what you’re doing if you find it helps you. There are good apps for this, or you can use a nice journal or an Excel sheet. Track whatever you want - minutes of study, words learned, tasks accomplished...a favourite of mine is ‘a time logger’, which can track your entire day. When I was in uni, it made me realize I was working a lot more than I thought, and reaching daily goals kept me motivated.

Rethink your internet consumption, especially news, TV shows and social media. Try having periods where you go off-screen whenever you need a break. Stuff like, ‘no TV before 6 pm’ or ‘no tumblr on weekdays’ can automatically make you a lot less stressed and a lot more productive. 

You can also decide to modify the way you engage with these things. For instance, if your studies involve a language, you could watch only TV shows in [language], or turn on [language] subtitles, or you could switch to Buzzfeed [country]. If you like IG, pinterest or tumblr, try having a separate ‘weekday’ account which is about healthy escapism and/or accountability: landscapes and poetry instead of fandom content, or a personal blog about your day - use the right tags and connect with others who’re going through the same thing.    

Imagine you’re teaching someone. I’m guessing you’re passionate about your subject, so turn your study sessions into imaginary conversations. Teaching a lesson (or making a speech) is often the best way to see what you understand, what you need to work on, and what you’re interested in learning more about.

Websites like b-ok can help you find books about your subject (or not) - possibly stuff you’re not actually compelled to read, but which sounds interesting nonetheless. Broaden your horizon, discover different stuff, and sooner or later you’ll find yourself making connections between the exciting stuff you’re basically reading for fun and the actual subject you’re studying.

And: remember why you’re studying this. What are you passionate about? Why did you fall in love with your subject? Why are you studying it? Sometimes we have to endure a few boring classes to get to the good part, and that’s okay.

And finally: visualize the future. The world will get better, and at some point you’ll be glad you’ve spent a few (or many) hard and boring hours getting your degree. What are you going to do after this? Make a ‘future’ board, write a fake Wikipedia article about yourself, give a Nobel or graduation speech, give a pep talk to your (imaginary) future children about the hardships you faced on Zoom and how you overcame them to become the mom they know and love. Whatever works, no matter how ridiculous or narcissistic or far-fetched is a good thing!

I hope this helps! Remember to remain calm and positive, and talk to yourself as if you were talking to a child or a best friend. Less You suck and the world is going to end and more Yes, you didn’t do great today, but we can always do better tomorrow, it’s okay to have an off day! Uni is hard enough under any circumstances, and right now...do your best and resist the bait of dark thoughts: we will get through this, and everything will be alright. It’s how it works.

#ask #studying #students problems #life tips #life advice #motivation #anxiety #mental help #singing about the dark times #you can do this <3

[bizarrelovesquare]

Hello, it’s Evie, and this is my new account!

brief explanation under the cut so I can get it off my chest, but it’s not required to read <3

I realized over the last several months that I did not like being perceived the way I was online, and that I have the power to just walk away and start over on a smaller scale and avoid anything I don’t want to be part of. In July, with no warning, I cleared out and abandoned/deactivated any accounts around the web that didn’t make me happy. All I have now are this, pinterest, ao3, and a new private twitter just for close friends.

Being online had come to feel like an expectation, no longer something for recreation, and most of it wasn’t fun. It honestly had been feeling that way for awhile, but I reached the last straw when I briefly got involved with a fandom on twitter (yuck) several months ago that was absolutely horrid. I realized what a mess it all really was, I finally snapped, and I got the hell away from everything and everyone.

It was easy to leave other sites because there was so much that I wanted to escape from--the hostility and toxicity, people’s dumbassery, the feeling of not being adequate enough as an artist, the pressure to get constant interaction, feeling like I was being watched all the time by hundreds to thousands of people who didn’t care about me as a person, etc. Social media was too much for my introvert self. However, I was on the fence about what I wanted to do with tumblr, so I sat on it for two months and mulled it over. I actually love this site because it’s mostly chill and has the best format, it’s creative, and it’s easy to avoid anything you don’t want to see, but I just didn’t love the baggage that I had on my old blog. I’d been on there since 2013 and had grown and changed a lot, particularly over the past year, and there was so much way back in there that didn’t represent who I’ve come to be, and it honestly made me feel stuck, even after I tried changing my url, giving that blog a makeover, and being more myself.

Several years ago, I spent an ungodly amount of time on this site trying to appeal to others, instead of letting myself just exist authentically and showcase all of my personality. I got fandom popular pretty early on, and for a long time, it made me feel like it was my duty to post about the things that got me popular and make original posts that my heart wasn’t even halfway into, worded in a way that would get notes. Keep in mind, I was younger and dumber when doing that and had nothing else going for me at that time (it was a low point in life). I definitely grew out of that mentality, but I couldn’t get away from all the posts I’d made that I no longer cared about that wouldn’t stop getting notes and the reputation I had developed for being known for a particular thing. I felt like there were too many followers who weren’t really there for me as a person or any other niche interests of mine, and it was really holding me back from just posting what I want and as much as I want, even after I quit caring and tried to just present as the real me. I knew it was my blog and it didn’t matter what others wanted, but I think the main thing was that I felt held back by my older ways of using tumblr, and I realized that I don’t want anything from that period of my life still attached to me. I didn’t know who I was back then, so I defined myself by an obsession. These days, I want people to see me as a whole person with a real life who just happens to also really like some things.

On top of that, again back when I was several years younger and at the lowest point of my life, I used to vent way too much about negative things in my personal life that don’t matter anymore, and even though I went through my archive and deleted them all, even though I know nobody else remembers them or is looking at them, I still knew that they happened, and I didn’t want that energy to keep following me. There was also evidence of ex-friendships and relationships I’m not proud of, ways I acted that I just don’t vibe with now, and just too much I remember that didn’t represent current-day me, and I want to actually break the connection to those memories. So with all of that, I decided I’d feel best to remake and start fresh. I got away from negative feelings everywhere else, so why not here, too? Any posts on the old blog that I love can eventually be reblogged over here. I’m going to curate a fresh new gallery of things I love, while feeling at peace about the whole thing.

My life is nothing like it was years ago. I’m actually happy with myself and my life and have been for nearly a year now. I know who I am now. I’ve healed/am healing from a lot of personal things. I have budding careers in everything I love and am working towards my dream life. I’m not ashamed of anything about myself. I still have bad days sometimes, but I don’t live in my misery. I like being positive and want to stay that way as much as possible.

I also never really let me show myself as a creator as much as I would have liked before, and I want to focus more on that from now on. As far as fan content goes, I’ve gotten back into writing fics and am no longer scared to share them. I’ve been working more on cosplay this year than I have in years. I also want to try to get into making gifs. Additionally, I am a writer (fiction and non), photographer, and aspiring designer in real life, so some original work might show up now and then, too, if it’s something I’m really proud of. I also want to post about mental health and recovery. My blog will still have plenty of fan content, but I want to sprinkle in some other things that are important to me as well.

I just want to be in a quiet peaceful corner among good people. Lately, I’ve realized that I want my life to be as lowkey as possible, both online and irl. I just want to vibe and do my thing for myself, surrounded by a few good friends. I learned way too late that fandoms are hell if you branch out too far, and that I also hate being in the spotlight, even in regards to things I create. I don’t exist for the consumption of others, and that’s such a freeing thing to realize. Anything I post/rb is solely because I want it on my blog; I don’t care what happens to it after I put it there. I post for me, I make my art for me (and sometimes my jobs), and if my friends enjoy it, and if I make new friends along the way, that’s awesome! But impressing everybody is just not a thing I can nor want to do anymore. You don’t have to run yourself ragged trying to spread yourself across the internet, whether as a fan or a creator. If a site was to disappear, what do all those likes and followers mean? Absolutely nothing. At the end of the day, all you have is you and how YOU feel about yourself, so spend your time on here (or anywhere, really) existing for you, first and foremost.

I’ve gone back to my very old internet days of not trying to impress anyone, while combining that mentality with the wisdom and sense of self that I’ve gained with age. Maybe you won’t be able to tell a difference, but I’m the one living in my head, and I definitely can tell that I’ve grown, a lot in my life has changed, and I am much more confident in myself, and I want to have a blog that 100% feels like me and has no bad associations attached. I’m not the first person to make a new account and won’t be the last. Things like this are supposed to mostly be FOR FUN, and too many people these days have gotten away from that. Don’t feel like you have to keep living up to some reputation that was built years ago, and don’t feel like you exist for others. Be yourself, embrace changes as you grow, do what’s comfortable and healthy for you and makes you happy, and the right people will like you for that. The most important of them being you. <3

#evie's diary

[meem-didi]

Journal: Final Reflection

The fashion industry has complex links to many other sectors, including manufacturing, advertising, raw material processing, transport, and retailing. The immense profits to be gained in the retail industry give rise to the desire to engage in unethical practices. When suppliers, distributors, designers, or customers are exploited or treated unfairly, fashion industry executives have an ethical duty to improve the situation.  

Within Fashion Ethics and Culture course, we were given the opportunity to explore the breadth of creative, aesthetic, and social/cultural expression of design through the lens of ethical and historic considerations – as it is and how it needs to change, the role of the MENA region and its relationship to fashion media.  

As a student of DIDI, I felt the same link and inspiration between the Fashion Ethics and Culture course and my vision of how I want to be as a future designer and how I should change the current fashion industry status quo with my future career path. The course creates a creative paradigm for learning ethical fashion design through the lens of ethical and historic considerations. Students are introduced to fashion history, cultural criticism, contemporary culture, and the diversity of representation including ethical considerations and perspectives.

In my opinion, this course plays as a moderator between all other fashion courses we study and extend to other courses with depth like sociology and design histories and theories to link and emphasis all courses material in a dynamic way. We covered various subjects relating to Body Image Problems, Fur Trade Issues, Cultural Hegemony and Appropriation, Consumer Over-consumption, Environmental Effects, and Concerns, Advertisement Conflicts, Brand Name Forgery, Sweat Shop Working Conditions, and Exclusiveness and Injustice Issues; that simultaneously vary from micro to macro scale through lectures, group activities, open discussions in class, and individual presentations.

The True Cost Formula 

Investigate your Wardrobe

Doughnut Economics

ATCAC-Disrupting the Fashion System

Earth Logic: the turning point

Careers in the Fashion Industry

The future of Garment Technology in Circular Fashion

Market Segmentation

Fashion for Good: Virtual Tour

Fashion & Society

Made in America

“Luxury: Behind the mirror of high-end fashion”

Empathic Design Process

SOKO Kenya - A people first company

Innovative Fashion Marketing

Key trends innovating Fashion Marketing

Fashion for Good: Virtual Tour

Untangled Egyptian Beauty Standards

The Fashion & Race database

The Modist- Modest Fashion Dream

About Time: Fashion and Duration

The It Girl: Ashley Al Busmait

I enjoyed the above-listed topics and guest lecture discussions we had this semester, but certain to a whole new way of perceiving the world. I would love to deepen and expand my knowledge on the technology and circularity of the fashion industry future as well as focus on modest fashion and ethical practices and success and failure aspects of the Modist business experience. Whether through merging my learning outcome within this semester to my nest fashion studio or final thesis.

Here's my list of the most meaningful subjects for me and some of the highlights of my recent blogs on these topics:

ATCAC-Disrupting the Fashion System

ORIGIN AND HISTORY

Atacac is a Swedish fashion studio that Jimmy Herdberg and Rickard Lindqvist created in 2016. Atacac is designed to disrupt the current fashion system. Atacac is like a laboratory for developing ideas and principles. Then they work as consultants sharing that with other brands to improve their design. The other way they work with other designers is what they call Share-wear. When they release a new product in their online store, they also offer the 2D pattern and the 3D model of the garment for free download. This builds a community of home sellers and independent brands that use their patterns and designs. In certain terms, you can do whatever you want. There is a Credit Common Licence connected to the Share-wear which means you can use it commercially in any way you like, and you can make improvements to it, But you need to give credit back to Atacac if you use it commercially and market the product. You also need to make your development available for other people to keep developing further.

For me ATCAC is a brilliant business module example that is trying to blow the entire system to the ground, I loved how I saw ATCAC embodying every principle, I have been learning for the past 3 years. This blog post and the investigation behind it gave me hope that I can succeed in doing something different with my future dream brand.

Innovative Fashion Marketing

Stretchy Kids’ Clothes Petit Pli gets a growing identity

A sustainable fashion design example that offers apparel that evolves as the wearer grows older has an innovative branding that sounds like “more human” and “less professional." The idea is to reduce the waste of apparel and save parents’ money as children progress up a range of sizes in the first three years of their lives.

It needs time and education to promote meaningful behavioral change. We assume that we are too late for much of our generation. We assume, though, that we are just in time for the next era of LittleHumans. The brilliance of the brand strategy is in anchoring on the opportunity where new parents and young children are more open to improvement and learning than any other part of our community. They do everything not only to promote constructive behavioral improvement but also to make it as seamless as possible.

Marketing as a term became cliché of how much brands are using it without actually making the right –positive impact on their users, within this blog post example of how marketing approach could be current, supportive and extending the brand value to further stage where the client loyalty will be granted due to that extended value, this reminded me of applying the product-service systems methodology, where it's not only the brand responsibility to produce and market a product but they innovate different approaches to extended their after-sale services and product value to emotionally engage their clients.

Empathic Design Process

Empathy is the core of the entire process of Design Thinking. Putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes reinforces our ability to interpret information, and lets us understand how other humans perceive the world around us.

 The realm of fashion design is shifting from an external focus on the industry, or an internal focus on integrating technology, to an empathetic focus on people. While it’s not too difficult to rally people around this general idea, it can be hard at first to understand how to translate it into tactics.

I ask myself as a designer, how do we make a good connection between a fashion worker and a customer? My solution to this question is to make fashion employees the hero of the story, create brand ideals around them. Plan company modules to be a win-win for staff and stakeholders. As designers, we should reconfigure how the framework is giving back to the societies through which we work. I expect, as a future fashion designer, to build a secure working environment that will help better the lives of single mothers in Egypt. By offering comprehensive educational opportunities and curating future working talents. The Empathy Concept process will be incorporated not only to understand the consumers but also most critically, to understand the true needs of the heroes behind my future brand.

Technology & future of Circular Fashion

Fashion has always been a major hub for innovation — from the invention of the sewing machine to the rise of e-commerce. As technology, fashion is both forward-looking and cyclical. At $2.2 T, the apparel industry is now one of the top sectors in the global economy. Nowadays, apparel technology is rising more than ever. From robots that sew and cut clothing to AI algorithms that anticipate style patterns, to VR mirrors in dressing rooms, technology automates, customizes, and speeds up every aspect of fashion.

In the optimistic scenario, the future will be led by innovators and collaborators, the industry will leap forward in developing digital passports for clothing that carries an internationally recognized digital asset trigger that could be accessed by designers, retailers, recyclers, and customers alike. This type of standardized infrastructure and labeling approach means that not every brand or approach provider has its own patented approaches, leaving customers stuck in the sea of things to consider. In this way, the future of fashion technologies could truly unify the industry around common practices that would make circularity more visible to everyone.

Reference list

Accenture and H&M Foundation (2018). Circular x Fashion Tech. [online] Available at: https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/PDF-74/Accenture-GCA-Circular-FashionTech-Trend-Report-2018.pdf [Accessed 3 Oct. 2020].

By Insider Trends (2019). Why does Swedish clothing brand Atacac give its patterns away for free? - Insider Trends. [online] Insider Trends. Available at: https://www.insider-trends.com/why-does-swedish-clothing-brand-atacac-give-its-patterns-away-for-free/ [Accessed 14 Sep. 2020].

CB Insights (2020). The Future Of Fashion: From Design To Merchandising, How Tech Is Reshaping The Industry. [online] CB Insights Research. Available at: https://www.cbinsights.com/research/fashion-tech-future-trends/ [Accessed 26 Oct. 2020].

CHANGE, W. (2020). THE WARDROBE CRISIS. [online] THE WARDROBE CRISIS. Available at: https://thewardrobecrisis.com/the-magazine/2020/8/26/4-tech-innovations-that-will-change-the-future-of-sustainable-fashion [Accessed 26 Oct. 2020].

CLO (2020). Live Q + A with Fashion Studio Atacac. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHpiD5u0e1w&feature=youtu.be [Accessed 14 Sep. 2020].

Dawood, S. (2019). Stretchy kids’ clothing Petit Pli gets an identity that grows. [online] Design Week. Available at: https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/1-7-april-2019/stretchy-kids-clothing-petit-pli-gets-an-identity-that-grows/ [Accessed 31 Oct. 2020].

Design Indaba (2013). Data Dress: A tangible representation of your online movements | Design Indaba. [online] Design Indaba. Available at: https://www.designindaba.com/articles/creative-work/data-dress-tangible-representation-your-online-movements [Accessed 26 Oct. 2020].

Dezeen (2017). Ryan Mario Yasin’s Petit Pli kids clothing expands to fit as children grow. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ8VSvkz_4w [Accessed 31 Oct. 2020].

Dubai Design Week (2019). GGS Success Story: Featuring Petit Pli by Ryan Mario Yasin. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a2eIix1rUI [Accessed 31 Oct. 2020].

Dyson on (2019). Petit Pli: The unlikely fashion brand that wants to end industry waste by making clothes that grow. [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/dyson-on/meet-the-inventors-fabric-fantastic-c5f18d7639bf [Accessed 31 Oct. 2020].

Fashion United (2020). The future of garment technology in circular fashion. [online] Fashionunited.uk. Available at: https://fashionunited.uk/news/business/the-future-of-garment-technology-in-circular-fashion/2020091750927 [Accessed 26 Oct. 2020].

Givens, D. (2020). ASOS Unveils Its Made In Kenya Collection Collaboration With Soko Kenya. [online] Black Enterprise. Available at: https://www.blackenterprise.com/asos-unveils-its-made-in-kenya-collection-collaboration-with-soko-kenya/ [Accessed 27 Oct. 2020].

GLOBAL FASHION AGENDA (2020). Design for Longevity. [online] Designforlongevity.com. Available at: https://designforlongevity.com/page/about [Accessed 14 Sep. 2020].

Herdberg, J. (2020). Kokokaka - Work. [online] Kokokaka.com. Available at: https://kokokaka.com/work.html [Accessed 14 Sep. 2020].

Krantz, J. (2017). Atacac uses game tech to disrupt the fashion system - MAGIC FABRIC. [online] MAGIC FABRIC. Available at: https://magicfabricblog.com/atacac-uses-game-technology-change-fashion-system/ [Accessed 14 Sep. 2020].

LeVine, S. (2018). Automated fashion is now a reality in new Chinese store. [online] Axios. Available at: https://www.axios.com/fashion-automated-alibaba-china-store-d476b4a4-d74d-410e-9518-bea2449203da.html [Accessed 26 Oct. 2020].

Morrison, H., Petherick, L. and Ley, K. (2019). THE FUTURE OF CIRCULAR FASHION A COLLABORATIVE REPORT BY ACCENTURE STRATEGY AND FASHION FOR GOOD ASSESSING THE VIABILITY OF CIRCULAR BUSINESS MODELS. [online] ACCENTURE STRATEGY AND FASHION FOR GOOD. Available at: https://d2be5ept72nvlo.cloudfront.net/2019/05/The-Future-of-Circular-Fashion-Report.pdf [Accessed 2 Oct. 2020].

NB Studio (2019). Petit Pli - Brand Identity. [online] The Drum Awards. Available at: https://www.thedrumdesignawards.com/drum-design-awards-2019/brand-identity-design/petit-pli-brand-identity [Accessed 31 Oct. 2020].

Partners, K. (2017). PROTOCHIC. [online] PROTOCHIC. Available at: https://www.protochic.com/stories/2017/3/17/kenyan-manufacturer-soko-kenya-partners-with-british-retailer-asos [Accessed 27 Oct. 2020].

Petit Pli (2020a). MISSION 2: FUTURE OF HUMANITY Earth’s Hidden Figures. [online] Available at: http://ryanmarioyasin.com/hosting/BLMcomic.pdf [Accessed 31 Oct. 2020].

Petit Pli (2020b). Petit Pli. [online] Petit Pli. Available at: https://shop.petitpli.com/ [Accessed 31 Oct. 2020].

Petit Pli (2020c). Unstick The Sticky Alien! [online] Petit Pli. Available at: https://shop.petitpli.com/blogs/news/unstick-the-sticky-alien [Accessed 31 Oct. 2020].

Pfaff, M. (2018). Amesterdam University of Applied Sciences. [online] AMFI.nl. Available at: https://amfi.nl/news/technology-is-transforming-the-fashion-industry [Accessed 14 Sep. 2020].

Sherriff, L. (2020). This Company Is Making Children’s Clothes That Actually Grow As The Kid Does. Forbes. [online] 16 Feb. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lucysherriff/2020/02/24/this-company-is-making-childrens-clothes-that-actually-grow-as-the-kid-does/?sh=81b30233f70f [Accessed 31 Oct. 2020].

Sohini Dey (2018). Can artificial intelligence and fashion create a smart stitch? [online] mint. Available at: https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/Vp81luEXDz3lWuvvYVYIdO/Can-artificial-intelligence-and-fashion-create-a-smart-stitc.html [Accessed 26 Oct. 2020].

SOKO Kenya (2020). SOKO Kenya. [online] Soko-kenya.com. Available at: https://www.soko-kenya.com/ [Accessed 27 Oct. 2020].

The Trampery (2019). Petit Pli : Future Design for “LittleHumans” - The Trampery. [online] The Trampery. Available at: https://thetrampery.com/2019/12/02/petit-pli-future-design-for-littlehumans/ [Accessed 31 Oct. 2020].

‌

#fal301 #fashion #ethicalfashion #fashionblog #week13 #entry23

[uncloseted]

Emotional Health and Wellbeing During Isolation/Quarantine

Hi everyone!

I know that a lot of us are currently social distancing, in self-isolation, or in city/state/country mandated quarantine, so I wanted to put together a post about some things you can do to improve your mental health while you’re protecting your physical health.  Some of these have become sort of trendy lately, so apologies if you’ve heard them before, but I’m trying to approach making this list from a place of evidence-based lifestyle changes to improve mental health.

Meditation

Meditation reduces anxiety and depression and improves mood when done over a long period of time.  Start with a free app like Headspace or Calm to learn how to meditate and to get into the habit of meditating regularly.

Journaling

Journaling can help you let go of any shame, anxiety, fear, and anger you might be carrying around with you.  Write your thoughts down somewhere that’s private, whether that’s in a journal, a password protected blog, a locked file on your computer, or something else.  Try to let your emotions come out naturally instead of worrying about whether what you’re writing sounds good or not.

Gratitude

Along with journaling, making a habit of practicing gratitude is a good way to improve your overall mood, both in the short term and in the long term.  Write down the big and little joys in your life, write about the people you’re grateful for, write three good things that have happened to you that day, write thank you notes to people who have helped you (whether you intend to actually send them or not), write things that you like about yourself. Be as specific as you can.  In this difficult time, it can be hard to think of anything as being good, so it’s important to focus on the small things that are bringing you joy.

Mental Health Apps

If you're already struggling with your mental health and need something a little more robust than journaling, you might consider trying out a mental health app.  There are a ton of them out there, but these are the ones that the Anxiety and Depression Association of America has vetted, with a rundown of their opinions on each one.

Exercise and sunlight

These next two are a bit obvious, so bear with me, but making sure you’re getting exercise and sunlight even when you’re isolated is really important to reduce the likelihood that you’ll become anxious or depressed.  If you’re still in a place where this is a possibility, taking a 20 minute walk outside once a day is a great way to address both of these (as far as we know, you should be fine leaving your house as long as you’re maintaining six feet of distance between you and other people).  If that’s not a possibility, sitting outside is the next best thing, followed by getting a light therapy lamp and taking vitamin D supplements.  In terms of home workouts, don’t pressure yourself to commit to doing an hour of yoga a day or to walk 10,000 steps around your house.  Just getting moving for 15 or 20 minutes is enough, whether that’s making sure to walk 250 steps every hour, doing a few bodyweight exercises when you wake up in the morning, doing a yoga/pilates video, playing an exercise video game, or something else.  A few exercise apps are offering month long free trials during the virus; FitOn, Forte Fit, The Daily Burn, Golds Gym, and CorePower Yoga are a few that I’ve seen recently.

Interpersonal interactions

Especially if you’re isolated alone during this period of time, making sure you get regular interpersonal interactions in is really important for your continued wellbeing. Videochat with friends and family using apps like Skype and Zoom, play games or watch movies online with friends, and just generally prioritize staying connected to the people who are closest to you.

Limit your social media

That said, try to limit your social media consumption during this time.  The doom and gloom headlines about the spread of the virus, the virtue signaling from your favorite influencers, and the overall feelings of hopelessness online aren’t conducive to good mental health. Consider muting people or accounts who are making you feel anxious during this time or trying to limit the amount of time you’re using social media apps in general. It’s important to stay informed, but being constantly bombarded with reminders that the world is in crisis isn’t helpful to anyone.

Be Kind to Yourself

This is more of a general one, and it encompasses a lot of things, but make an effort to be kind to yourself during this time. Get dressed in the morning even though you’re not going anywhere. Take baths using the bath bombs you’ve been saving or that special face mask.  Make your favorite foods that are a little too time-intensive to do during the week, or bake if you like doing that.  Don’t give in to the pressure to be productive and create something great during this time.  It’s okay if all you can do right now is play Animal Crossing.  You don’t need to discover the concept of gravity or write the next great novel just because you have some (forced) extra time on your hands.  You just need to get through to the other side as best as you can.  On the flip side, though, having goals that you’re working on every day can be good for your mental health, too.  Even if you’re working on a goal for five minutes a day, that adds up over time.

Some miscellaneous resources:

If you belong to a library, see if they offer Libby, Overdrive, or another platform for you to download eBooks.

If you’re looking to learn something new, check out Coursera, Kahn Academy, Class Central, and others offer classes in pretty much every topic you could imagine for free.  They’re easy to navigate and to understand.  Also check out Mango Languages if your library offers it, or a free language learning app like DuoLingo or Babbel.

Some video games are now free to encourage people to stay inside, including The Stanley Parable, Watch Dogs, Drawful 2, and more.

If you’re not on the podcast train already, now is a great time to start.  A few I like are Stuff You Should Know (well-researched, fun episodes that cover everything from science and history to pop culture and conspiracy theories), RadioLab (light hearted explorations into the philosophical implications of scientific topics), ReplyAll (”a show about the internet”), Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness (JVN talks with people. Enough said), Welcome to Night Vale (”HP Lovecraft does "A Prairie Home Companion”), and Within the Wires (an anthology series of found audio tapes in an alternate history version of Earth).

Many operas, orchestras, and theaters have put their performances for free online. The Met Opera is streaming it’s Live in HD performances. If you like theater, Playbill put together a list of recorded theater performances and where you can find them.  The Seattle Symphony and Wigmore Hall are streaming orchestral performances.  Many pop musicians are also doing mini concerts for their fans online, so check to see if your favorites are playing.

Online therapy. I wanted to mention this quickly because I know this is a stressful time for a lot of people and stress can create or exacerbate mental health problems.  Although in-person appointments are no longer available, many therapists have switched to online appointments.  If you’re struggling, please don’t let this deter you from seeking help.  If you’re in the US, check to see if your insurance (or parents’ insurance) cover mental health (or “behavioral health”).  Many of them do, making therapy much more affordable. 

If you’re in the US and struggling to figure out your financial situation during this crisis, this article from the New York Times has a lot of great information on how to find resources that are relevant to you.  You can also use the Benefit Finder can also help you identify the benefits that you are eligible to receive. 

Hopefully this helps some of you.  I know this is a really difficult time for everyone and I’m always here to listen.

#coronavirus #corona #covid_19 #covid-19 #covid19 #effy's closet #self quarantine #self isolation #social distancing

[gingerteaonthetardis]

emerging from a depression nap to answer some...

quarantine questions!

i was tagged by the wonderful @paigenotblank. and because i've gotten some new followers lately and i want to say hello, i am tagging a random assortment of you wonderful people! @goodtobealunatic​, @pixie-diddle-duster​, @non-binarypal7​, @jaricchi​, and @thirteengrins​. but no pressure on any of you, of course! and tag me if you do decide to do it, i'm curious to get to know some folks!

1. are you working from home?

well, i'm shit at participating in capitalism under the best of circumstances, and these are definitely not the best of circumstances. so, mostly not!

2. are you home alone? who is with you?

i'm at home with my partner, who is currently still working, but remotely. i'm actually rather used to being home all day by myself, so it's been a bit of an adjustment to just... have another person around the house? like, living and breathing and walking around? luckily, i couldn't ask for a better housemate, really.

3. any pets?

while i desperately wish the answer to this was yes, we are renters and alas, have no pets. i have one rather sickly succulent from trader joe's, but it's about as lacking in vitamin d as i am.

4. who do you miss the most?

my massage therapist. my body pain is back with a vengeance, baby! (my massage therapist is also my mother-in-law, who i still see somewhat regularly, though not nearly as much as before. i miss her very much, but i will be seeing her for my birthday soon.)

5. have you gone anywhere?

the graveyard across the street for a nice, socially isolated walk! the community garden, late at night when nobody was there! and to the dollar store in town, because we're out of [checks pantry] everything and thirty minutes away from the nearest grocery store!

6. last thing you bought?

paper towels, kleenex, toilet paper... and rip-off dollar store brand thin mints. my priorities are fine, thank you.

7. how are you coping?

i'd like to think i'm coping well enough. as you've no doubt seen, i've been funneling a lot of excess energy into prompt fills and late night/early morning nonsense blogging. but the truth is, i'm not an unlimited well of creative energy and i'll probably need to start actually taking care of myself soon. starting with trying to figure out what the hell is going on with my sleep schedule!

i am very fortunate in that some of my best friends are already mostly online, so talking to them hasn't really changed. and i feel lucky in a lot of other ways.

8. are you a homebody?

my god, yes. but i'm also one of those plant-people who can't survive without plenty of sunshine, so the being indoors all the time thing isn't very good for me. my only goal for my birthday, really, is to go somewhere that i can walk around without worrying.

9. watching any new tv? movies?

as always, i'm sporadically watching the thick of it, the first season of doctor who, lots of period dramas, studio ghibli films, and other forms of comfort media. i'm pretty bad at starting new shows in general, and right now, i'm especially bad. familiar content only!!! no risk-taking media consumption!!

10. what events have been cancelled?

so, a while ago before all this happened, my birthday present was supposed to be tickets to a japanese breakfast concert. alas, that has been postponed, if not canceled. a family trip to the west coast has also been put off and/or cancelled, but... lowkey, i'm not super mad about that development.

11. best cancellation?

well, my driver's license was supposed to expire, but now i don't have to stand in line at the dmv! yay!

12. worst cancellation?

i mean, cancelling 2020 was a pretty big bummer.

13. any new hobbies?

i have taken up watercoloring! it's something i'd been meaning to do and have had the materials for, but now i actually have the time and, let's face it, the "well, fuck it" attitude i was missing. it's been very nice to have something to occupy my brain when i'm not writing or talking nonsense online.

14. what are you out of?

energy.

15. what are you listening to?

- fiona apple's new album, fetch the bolt cutters - the national's entire discography, because it's real sad girl hours - purity ring when i need to accomplish something/feel joy - moses sumney's new album, grae: part 1 - dry the river's acoustic album, shallow bed - keaton henson's six lethargies and romantic works, mostly for writing - vagabon's 2019 album, vagabon - nilüfer yanya's debut album, miss universe - the prompt songs i've received, mostly while writing

16. what are you reading?

not as much as i'd like. not even fanfic, really. my attention span isn't really that long just now. but when i get back to reading, i want to make my way through n.k. jemisin's the fifth season and a re-read of ursula k. le guin's lavinia. (for research purposes... that is, a ninerose au...)

17. have you been exercising?

no more or less than usual, which is never enough, but about as much as i can manage.

18. self care?

- drinking lots of water and cup after cup of tea - deep breathing when i start to panic or lose myself in apathy - trying to get outside as much as i can - attempting not to try to be there for everybody all the time at the expense of my own mental health - trying to solve this whole can't sleep and when i do sleep it's nightmares debacle

19. how's your toilet paper situation?

stable! it got a bit dodgy for a while, and we had to drive forty minutes to go to a specialty store and pay multiple dollars per individually-wrapped roll, but because we live in a rural area and the initial panic is mostly over, things seem to be back to fairly normal. not a lot of selection, but we haven't run out, and i'm grateful for that.

20. have you attempted a home hair cut or color?

no, but... did anyone else get bangs just before quarantine? in a few more weeks, i'm gonna be in the "growing out" phase with no recourse.

#abbey.txt #about me

[robhorninginternalexile]

what was google reader

July 1 was the anniversary of Google’s shutting down Google Reader, its tool for organizing RSS feeds. On Google’s scale of operations, Reader was a fringe product, but among a certain generation of 2000s era bloggers and writers, it was the public sphere, whose loss is now much nostalgized. 

Reader was a means to share links to posts and articles that were worth discussing, and a means to disseminate one’s own bloggy writing without having to optimize it for social media’s algorithms or hype it incessantly for a merely theoretical audience who might have missed it. 

The thriving RSS-driven social network assured people that their work would find its way to the people who had shown an interest in it. This generally encouraged (for better or worse) longer pieces of writing, often in response to other people’s posts, and a greater flexibility in subjects and arguments. There were no blue checks or euphemistic metrics (likes and favorites) foregrounded, and bad-faith engagement was typically remanded to comment sections that many bloggers took care to try to moderate. 

Some people managed to make money from this mode of discourse, but it was only haphazardly organized as an economic venture. Mainly it was characterized by its opposition to mainstream media; it consisted of writers who had not yet broken into conventional journalism or established themselves in academia, or were not interested in professionalized opinion-making but wanted to participate in a conversation that hashed together mainstream media’s failures, under-discussed social concerns and political perspectives, random pieces of popular culture, and personal narratives of everyday discovery or ennui. 

Even before Reader was discontinued, you could see this culture was falling apart. The pressure to professionalize became stronger, more evident in the writing, in the hedging of analysis, in the pretenses to specific forms of authority and the flows of subservience to certain locations of power. After vilifying and ridiculing bloggers, mainstream media outlets began to appropriate their style and co-opt some of the writers. The “blogosphere” started to take on the quality of a protracted audition. It was seemingly paralleling how “indie” culture became “alternative” in the 1990s.

But the main thing that destroyed blog culture was of course social media. It wasn’t a matter of an independent subculture selling out; it was more a vast expansion of the space of countenanced cultural production. Social media generalized the idea of ordinary non-media people broadcasting their thoughts and feelings and details from their lives on an all-day everyday sort of rhythm. Social media brought more people “online” — that is, into the everyday exchange of “content” as a mode of socializing. It brought scale to bear on a kind of communication that had been ad hoc, somewhat serendipitous. Everyone suddenly needed a profile and a rhythm of posting and consuming; everyone would eventually have a personalized feed. 

Blogging presumed the idea of people being online, on a computer all day long, probably in an office. Social media seized on the commercial possibilities of generalizing that posture as a lifestyle, anticipating the integration of mobile technologies into people’s lives. From that position, one doesn’t “consume information” but is instead immersed in its continual flow. The product tech and media companies can then sell is not the content itself but the modulation of that flow — the route it takes and the advertising that can be festooned along its way. 

This raised the stakes for bloggers who were already doing this form of writing and posting — gave them a potentially larger audience and a possible means of making a living by monetizing that audience. (They would be supplemented and then supplanted by influencers.) It also shifted the tenor of concerns in the “discourse” toward putting out attention-gathering opinions (”takes”), whose impact could be measured not through coherent comments but reflexive gestures (follows, likes, retweeets, and eventually the “ratio”). 

People began to track the much expanded everyday conversation through social media, which was popular enough to begin to collapse contexts — it was not a community of people who shared interests, politics, or writing styles; it was just a mishmash of everybody you ever knew. This changed what people said and how they said it and why. 

The platforms themselves were invested in organizing people’s attention to “the discourse” around compulsion rather than curiosity. This meant creating a sense of FOMO around the friends and family and glamorous-seeming strangers who personal lives were now more visible and accessible for consumption, and a sense of urgency around information and conversation in general, investing it with a sense of competition, a scoreboard (foregrounded metrics), the possibility of “winning.” Being informed didn’t matter so much as being appropriately positioned in the flow. The substance of any conversation or debate was insignificant relative to how that debate was organizing people, lining them up into factions, gathering metrics, goading their quantifiable participation. 

The main tool for this reorganization was the algorithmic feed. Google Reader operated on an algorithm so simple it didn’t require the word. It was just a chronological feed of everything you chose to see. It could sometimes become hard to keep up with, but you never wondered if you were missing anything, and you also knew exactly what sort of time commitment it would require to “get to the end.” Social media reorganized media consumption so that there could be no end, only continual information triage, which it would insist on helping you perform. 

Algorithmic feeds are usually described as being what people “really” want because they drive up time on platforms. This mistakenly conflates consumption and control with desire. It may be better understood as a bait and switch. Algorithmic feeds changed what people were actually consuming on platforms, but not by shifting the mix of content. People started to consume the experience of being catered to, of being nurtured (or force-fed). This is the opposite of being in a public sphere; it’s enjoying the process of seeing the public sphere transcended, subordinated to the individual self.

What people get from social media is no longer about the information itself or the quality of what the algorithms choose but the process of having recommendations made to you; you consumed your own passivity in the face of torrents of information as a form of convenience. You got to enjoy the extinguishing of your own self-directed curiosity as a kind of luxury, as though it were a psychic massage working out the kinks and knots in your executive function until it was smoothed into nothing. 

[handsofdarkness]

Within Temptation’s Sharon Den Adel: “Sometimes I Lose It, Emotionally”

Within Temptation vocalist Sharon Den Adel looks back at her life in music, reflections on motherhood and feeling “naked” onstage…

You’ve come a long way since you first picked up a microphone. What would your teenage self think of how things turned out? “It would be mind-blowing for her. I was 14 when I first started singing with a band while at school. That seems so far away now. Growing up in the Netherlands we didn’t have too many examples to follow. There were bands like Shocking Blue and Golden Earring, but they never seemed to reach too far outside the country. Being a full-time singer certainly wasn’t considered to be a future job.”

How did your parents react when you told them that’s what you wanted to do? “They said I could go to music school but they really wanted me to learn flute, piano, and how to read music. That didn’t sound very cool to me and I didn’t want to do it. I told them I wanted to skip all of that and just start singing, because I believed I was good at that. They wanted to support me, but in their own way. I never did learn to play the flute. They soon realised I was a good singer, but they didn’t think you could earn a living from music without being able to read notes. I still can’t!”

Each Within Temptation album has sounded notably different to its predecessor. Was it a struggle to find an identity? “It is something we were actively and consciously doing, or searching for. We have always wanted to push the borders of what we felt were limiting us within the scene. It’s a good challenge and it keeps things interesting. We like to reinvent ourselves on every album. If we had to stay the same as we were when we started, I doubt we’d have kept the band together so long.”

In 2011 Robert quit being part of the touring band. How difficult was that for you both? “We didn’t like it, but it was the best thing for both of us. We had actually come through a break-up before that. We broke up as a couple for a little while in 2008. When we got back together we decided the band didn’t work too well when we’re both touring together. We’re hard-headed people and sometimes it’s too much to be working together all the time. Now it works best with us writing in separate rooms. We send emails to each other rather than talk. It can be a fragile thing, but if you’ve worked with your partner you know it can be horrible. We can get into a fight within five minutes. Within the world of Within Temptation we collaborate with different people, and that works well.”

You don’t ever write music together? “No, never. I send ideas to him, and he either works on those, or he sends something to me and I work on that. We don’t sit together in one room. We tried it that way for a long time and it wasn’t working. On our first two albums he would write the music and I’d come in and work on the vocals. Since then I’ve got way more involved in the actual music. We can’t write together, but we’ve learned from our mistakes and have found a way that works.”

As a mum of three, how do you balance career and family life? “I found it hard at first. I had to change the balance of my personal life and the band. In the past I would go on tour for six weeks or more at a time, and I’d be away from home a lot. Now we manage it so that we tour for two weeks and then have a break, and then we go out again. It’s generally two weeks on the road and then two weeks at home. It’s more expensive that way, but it keeps the band alive. Everyone has family commitments.”

Within Temptation songs are always invested with considerable emotion. Which songs are most meaningful to you? “The last album was hugely important for me, coming after the loss of my father. I was still in an emotional state when I was writing Resist with the guys. Holy Ground is particularly meaningful to me, as is Supernova. The Cross [from 2007’s The Heart Of Everything] is another significant one, but there are so many. It’s not just because they deal with subjects personal to me, but sometimes songs relate to people around me. I may be a bystander, but you get sucked into people’s lives and their challenges because you care about them. I take parts of my own emotions along with things that have affected other people, and then integrate those into a song. Because of that we get through a range of subjects on our albums.”

Are there any you find tough to perform for personal reasons? “Say My Name [from the U.S. edition of 2004’s The Silent Force] and Forgiven [The Heart Of Everything] are hard songs for me to sing. You’re so naked on stage with those. Sometimes, and without meaning to, singing those songs brings back so much that you find yourself in an emotional state. It’s beautiful really, because I am not ashamed to show that side of me. That feeling – you can’t get closer to the origins of a song than that. You want to connect with the feeling, but not to the point where you lose it, emotionally. But sometimes I do.”

Did the success of 2011’s The Unforgiving and 2014’s Hydra change you as a band? “Not really. You only see it when you look back. At the time you’re carried away by the flow of everything and you don’t always see things changing. Afterwards, I look back almost with surprise and understand that it was all pretty successful. Of course you note where you are in the charts and that’s always a sign that something’s happening, but it’s only later that you realise how important it was, or how people really understood and connected with a certain song or album.”

Did you feel under pressure to maintain that level of success? “Success is not something you can control. Even after [second album] Mother Earth in 2000, people were wondering whether we could keep it up. Every album has brought a different kind of success; it might be musically or it might be because more fans have discovered you. The only pressure we feel is about whether we still matter to the music scene. We want to make music that feels important to people. Music is essential to life, so being relevant to people is the only aim we have. It’s like a circle: you give, and you get back.”

What do you think caused the writer’s block you experienced in the build-up to last album Resist? “At a certain age, things start happening for the second time in your life. When I was younger my grandparents died, and then as you get older more people leave you. It’s inevitable. It’s that circle of life. It causes you to stop and reflect on what’s important. The problems began when my father started getting ill. There was too much emotion and I couldn’t deal with it. For me, when there’s too much emotion I can’t write. I feel overwhelmed by it all. I need to be able to put it in a place, to know where it’s coming from and how to deal with it. Only then can I make music. I can’t do it when I’m right in the middle of it.”

Did the band come close to breaking up? “In the beginning of that period, I didn’t know if we could come back. Eventually, it was that uncertainty about the future that enabled me to explore the emotions I was having. I was talking to everyone and realised it wasn’t just me going through it. Everyone was having trouble coming up with new music. Of course, we wanted to continue. Music and this band is my passion, but I realised that we had to change the balance. It also helped to realise that there were a lot of new things happening in music, and not just within our scene, so we took inspiration from those sources, too. My heart and roots are in metal and rock, but I like all kinds of music. The challenge was to interpret something that might be happening in pop into our own genre.”

How important was your 2018 solo project My Indigo in getting things moving again? “It forced me to get out of my comfort zone. It made me look at music in different ways and get creative again. A lot of what I learned helped when it came to Resist. The song Firelight was originally written for My Indigo, for example, but we roughened it up a bit and it ended up on Resist, so it was a sort of bridge between the two. Writing rock music again came naturally afterwards, and that was a huge relief. When you’ve done a lot of intimate stuff, the heavier material then seems to come more easily.”

Resist brought new sounds and themes to the table. Is it a one-off or the start of a new era? “We felt like we developed a lot on this album, but overall it’s still only a small step and we hope to take things even further, along similar lines, in future. The album was inspired by the way we live today, with everything done on the internet and the way that takes away our privacy. Often we are not aware of the impact social media has on us, or that certain companies know so much about what we’re doing. There are not enough laws to protect our privacy. Back in the Second World War people would burn archives, for example, to not give away the places that Jewish people were living. But now all that information would be available digitally. We don’t see the whole picture. We turn away from the ways in which data about us and our lives is being stored and used.”

Does it worry you that your children were born into a time where this seems normal? “The scary thing is that the younger generation, such as my children, don’t remember a time when this wasn’t the case. I know it makes me sound really old, but it’s dangerous that young people are so addicted to communicating online, and not in person or even on the phone. They’re in love with it; they don’t want to give it up. When I was young I had to go outside and talk to people and make friends that way. The worst thing for young people now is that they’re trying to do this through a phone screen, and actually they’re alone.”

How do you keep your voice in good nick on long tours? Nightwish’s Floor Jansen says it’s all down to her consumption of red wine, but she might have been joking… “(Laughs) If I’m honest, I also drink a lot of red wine, but I’m not so certain it’s that good for your voice exactly! In fact, being on tour itself helps you to maintain your vocal chords. It’s like a muscle, so it needs training. The more you do it, the smoother it gets. You just need to remember your warming up time. I drink a lot of ginger tea, too, which helps me out, but really, practice is everything.”

Word has it you’re already working on new music. What can you tell us? “I’m leaving for Sweden in order to isolate myself and focus on writing. Robert has been working hard on new music, too. That has been going really well. It’s a continuation from where we were on the last album, but in a more progressive way. We’re in a good flow right now. We want to take the sound we had on Resist and refine it even more. It’s heavy stuff that we’ve been coming up with; both heavy and up-tempo. That’s making me happy!”

#Sharon den Adel #within temptation #2020 interviews

[anthemnz]

Anthem’s summer reading list – everything you need to know about the latest magazines on the block

Image source: The Spinoff

This year saw drastic shifts in New Zealand’s ever-changing media landscape. As we endured lockdowns, we also faced months of uncertainty about the future of our most loved magazines, many of which have entertained and educated us for decades. With previously owned Bauer Media titles back on the shelves, as well as brand new titles, we can breathe a sigh of relief this crucial touchpoint of our culture and identity has new life.

To keep up to date with who’s who and what’s changed in the media landscape at the end of this tumultuous year, we’ve put together our summer reading list with our top reading recommendations for the festive season.

VIVA

VIVA magazine celebrates New Zealand’s ‘good things in life’, from fashion and beauty to food, design and travel. There was something special about leafing through Issue 01 shortly after the magazine took a leap from a weekly New Zealand Herald supplement to a full-glossy quarterly magazine in its own right. The first quarterly instalment, explains editor Amanda Linnell, is about Celebrating Aotearoa Now by reflecting on how 2020 has been a year that has “pushed us all to explore where we’ve come from, and discuss where we want to go”. As such, the content and characters that feature give the magazine a fiercely inclusive feel, with many wahine toa gracing the pages with their individual stories of creativity, ancestry and identity. A must read is Emma Espiner’s feature, an essay titled ‘Looking backwards to the future’, in which she reflects on how her Radio New Zealand journalist husband Guyon Espier was an unlikely modern champion bringing the te reo language to mainstream airwaves, despite initial reluctance from old fashioned or change-fearing listeners. VIVA is the perfect magazine for life-style enthusiasts, foodies and fashion lovers with a big skew towards women through the content’s deliberate inclusivity drive. The publication offers a voice for those who are champions for diversity and inclusion with reputable leaders who have compelling stories to tell - including food, beverage, fashion and FMCG clients.

Ensemble

Ensemble is an online magazine providing fashion and lifestyle news with a strong insider’s perspective. This insight comes directly from its industry heavyweights’ founders, former FQ Editor Zoe Walker Ahwa and industry face, Rebecca Wadey (ex-Kate Sylvester, Jo Malone London and MAC). Their byline is ‘for both intelligence and whimsy’ – a perfect escape in a Covid-landscape. Ensemble’s four content pillars are culture, fashion, beauty and people – writing content for a high-socioeconomic audience who are concerned with conscious consumption, the business of fashion, style trends and industry related issues. The magazine’s investigative journalism is Melanie Reid-esque in terms of quality and often provided anonymously from scrupulous sources. It balances the content nicely with light reads and trend reports.  

Woman

Woman is an online and print magazine targeted at women 30 plus with articles on the latest in celebrity news, entertainment, local events and Kiwi women who stand out in their field of expertise. Published by Sido Kitchin’s School Road publishing, the magazine has a little bit of everything - from fashion, gardening, cooking, market appeal, beauty, art, home, wellbeing and book reviews. The features highlight inspiring stories of women who have achieved big things, including political editors Jessica Mutch McKay, Jane Patterson and Tova O’Brien who dive into their experience on the campaign trail during this year’s election.

Haven

Haven is New Zealand’s newest home and living magazine aimed at owners and renovating enthusiasts. The monthly magazine provides design advice, decorating inspiration and gardening tips, as well as showcasing local home, homemakers, food ideas and homeware trends. Haven’s content pillars are:

-          Edit – homeware trends and style influencers

-          Live – Kiwi homes that cross styles, locations and living situations

-          Transform – style ideas and advice for room makeovers

-          Grow – green spaces

-          Eat – recipes from Nici Wickes

The magazine targets everyday New Zealanders, rather than only featuring high end, lifestyle properties. It also profiles the interesting Kiwis who occupy the homes too, rather than just being homes focused.

SCOUT

Scout is a monthly, glossy magazine that pays homage to Aotearoa, New Zealand and the beauty we have on offer for Kiwis and, when our borders open, international visitors. We enjoyed learning about places through the eyes of a range of contributing writers, from Stan Walker on his home city  Tauranga, and Peta Mathias on Tairua. We also enjoyed reading about places we have been meaning to visit but never have, such as Tiritiri Matangi in Hauraki Gulf. The images are beautiful, and very authentic and true to life, rather than a polished tourism façade. The target market would be the domestic tourist or Kiwis wishing to explore their backyard. It appears to be a magazine for a wide demographic, that is not too high brow or elite, and accessible and relevant for many.

Thrive

Thrive, another magazine brought-to-market by School Road Publishing, is focused on all things health and wellbeing. Editor Wendyl Nissen has 20 years’ experience writing about wellness and vouched in the first edition that all content included in this magazine is “authentic and science based.” Each issue includes 3-4 long-form articles, ranging from day-in-the-life pieces that profile well-known Kiwis, to how to maintain DIY health and wellbeing practices from home. It’s relevant to anyone wanting to pay more attention to mindful living and comes full of tangible suggestions you can implement in your day-to-day life.

North & South

This long form current affairs magazine is back. The monthly is targeted at informed Kiwis aged 35–64 who are “endlessly curious about the country they call home.” Using a blend of investigative journalism, essays, profiles and reviews, the magazine explores everything that is complex and fascinating about New Zealand. The first issue since the magazine came back into publication under its new independent ownership asks, “are we better off on our own” in this ambiguous Covid era? A must-read is Damian Cristie’s feature “Closed” that explores everything that is at stake as we considering when, and how, we can re-open our borders. Donna Chisholm also writes a fascinating piece about how scientists at the Centre for Brain Research are studying tiny pieces of brain tissue to find treatments for Alzheimer’s, autism, epilepsy and other neurological conditions.

Metro

Metro has relaunched under new independent local ownership. The revamp sees it become a quarterly (formerly bi-monthly) magazine, with bigger issues featuring the best of New Zealand. Online, Metro plans to develop several digital platforms to give Aucklanders insider knowledge of their city. It’s great to see proper long form features back. The features were all well written and highly relevant to the narrative of the last few months and beautifully designed. It’s still the best food section in any New Zealand publication. We also love that Alex Casey is a columnist, it’s a perfect fit for Metro. There is so much content in here, it’s the type of magazine that will live well on your coffee table to keep coming back to.

Fashion Quarterly

FQ sees a welcome return for New Zealand’s style conscious. The magazine is aimed at women aged between 20-49 with content including shopping guides, new trends and style inspiration. The features dive into local breakthrough designers, sustainable fashion, conscious consumption, at-home skincare and self-improvement. The December issue arrives months after its publication came to an abrupt halt in March, with a clear re-focus on inclusivity and commenting on social and environmental issues readers care most about. Jacinta Fitzgerald’s essay “Where to from here?” is an interesting exploration of fashion’s most unforeseeable year and the future for sustainability in an industry that has an unsustainable track record.  

Capsule

They say times of adversity provide opportunity, and Capsule is a prime example of this in action. Following the closure of Bauer Media NZ in April, Kelly Bertrand, former Deputy Editor of New Zealand Woman's Weekly, joined forces with a group of other former magazine editors to launch Capsule, an online curated collection of smart stories and relatable rants. Capsule is aimed at savvy, strong, intelligent and stylish Kiwi women who want to know what’s happening, what’s trending, what’s new, and what’s worth talking about. Capsule aims to deliver clever content that resonates and connects deeply with Kiwi women and helps them feel successful, informed and entertained. The range and volume of content that Capsule covers means there’s something for everyone and every mood – you could be reading a Samsung vacuum cleaner review one moment, then learning about creating workplace opportunities for young Kiwis living with disabilities the next. Having just signed on a content partnership with Stuff, we can expect to see a lot more of Capsule in the near future – and we can’t wait.

Woman’s Day NZ and The New Zealand Woman’s Weekly

After a hiatus following Bauer Media’s collapse, Woman’s Day and NZ Woman’s Weekly are back in full force to serve celebrity gossip and royal family scandal. The weekly print publications are primarily aimed at women aged 35 to 60 and in addition to reporting on the latest Hollywood red carpet faux pas, they deliver gripping real-life reads, affordable fashion, easy nutritious meals, quick beauty tips, entertaining puzzles and more. Overall, these publications provide entertainment and escapism – perfect beach reading material. 

#opinion

[sherlollydramoine]

I Hate U, I Love U

Warnings: 18+ only, strong language, fighting/name calling/sorta bullying, mentions of cheating, alcohol consumption, and smutty mcsmut smut -- unprotected (wrap it before you tap it, it’s the responsible thing to do)

This is just a piece of fiction and don’t necessarily believe that Rami is truly like this, but we’ll never really know. I got a request, so I wrote it. That is all.

This is combining two requests that I’ve had, one for a while, the other just came in. This is for @lablanchett (sorry darling, that it took me so long to get this one out for you. I had another piece that I’d been working on and I just couldn’t make it work the way I wanted, and then I accidentally drunkenly deleted it- I hope this makes up for it) and @aulile for their requests: Rami and gf fight and have steamy makeup sex, and Rami and gf have a fight and Rami says some mean shit. Hope this fits in with the idea of whatever it was that you both were looking for. 

Word Count: 1890, again this is actually just a reallllllly long HC.

“I don’t fucking believe you!!” you yelled.

“Seriously, how fucking stupid are you to not believe it?” he questioned.

“Obviously verrrry stupid, because you can’t make me believe any of it! You’ve lied to me before, how is this any different?” you countered, trying to prove your point.

“When did I lie to you?”

“When you were in London. You fed me some ‘oh we’re just friends’ bullshit.”

“That was different than this.

“How? How is this different? You cheated on me once, why should I believe you now?”

“Goddddd… YN you are such a fucking bitch. I don’t have the fucking time to deal with your temper tantrums today.”

“Then don’t. I’m gone. You’ve lied, lied, lied, and I’m fucking done!”

“Fine! But you’ll regret this if you walk out that door!”

“I don’t give a fuck anymore Rami, I don’t! I’m tired of being the faithful, loyal servant to you… or shall I say to you, your fucking royal highness. That Oscar win did sure go straight to your fucking head. You’ve become the ‘I can do whatever I want because I’m rich and famous’ type that you always said you hated.

“YN, seriously?”

You stormed off in the direction of your bedroom. You refuse to put up with this shit any longer, you need to escape, to get away and start fresh somewhere.

He followed you into your shared bedroom where you were grabbing a suitcase out of the closet and began chucking random items into it.

“So you’re really leaving me, is that it?”

“What the fuck does it look like. I told you that I’m done, so I’m fucking done.”

His demeanor completely changed, his body stiffened, his mouth set in a hard line, when he turned on his heel and stormed out of the bedroom, slamming the bedroom door in his wake. You watched a picture fall off the wall and shatter into a million pieces on the hardwood. 

You could hear the garage door open, followed shortly by the sounds of his car tires squealing out of the driveway.

You almost broke down in tears, but you had to stick to your guns. You weren’t actually entirely sure that he had done what you had accused him of, but you couldn’t handle the stress that being with him entailed anymore. And you couldn’t take back any of the hurtful words that you spat out.

You love him, very deeply, but sometimes he makes your blood boil.

Throwing whatever other random shit you think you might need, you slam the suitcase shut and zip it closed, you take off to the garage, get in your car and you certainly don’t look back

It took you a solid twelve weeks to stop crying, but eventually the hurt turned into more of a constant dull ache. It had been over seven months now since you’d seen him, and since then you’d flourished at work, gotten the promotion that you’d been working towards, and had made a bunch of new friends. 

You still talk to some of your old friends, the shared friends, but most of the communication with them died the moment you shut down all of your social media accounts.

Life was great for you, even though the hurt was still there, and despite the fact that you were living in a tiny ass shithole apartment in a shit part of LA, you were happy. You told yourself you didn’t need him, and you believed it

You had closed all your social media accounts, and turned off any and all notifications that came up with his name on your phone. You’d changed your number, and blocked his  just for good measure. You did this for your sanity. 

Your boyfriend was famous and you didn’t want to see all the shit that was being said about you online. You two had plenty of naysayers online and it would have dealt a crippling blow to your mental health.

So you honestly avoid using the internet at all, unless it’s necessary.

It was when you were nearing the eight month mark in your breakup that you saw him for the first time since you’d left. 

You were out for drinks with some of your friends, who were at that moment in time giving you shit for not being on any social media, when you saw him. 

You fought the urge to run and you kept your head down, not allowing yourself to openly stare like some of the others around you. Though you couldn’t help but notice that he looked kind of like shit. He seems as if he’d aged dramatically in nearly eight months, he looked too thin, and very worn down.

It was your turn to buy the round of shots so you made your way to the bar, standing on the opposite side from where he was sitting, occupying one of the stools.

You thought you’d remained out of sight until you heard a familiar voice behind you say your name.

You sighed audibly and turned around, ready to fight if necessary. You’ve done well without him, not sure you could say the same for him though.

“Yes?” you snipped, turning around to face the one person that you really didn’t want to deal with.

“I thought that was you. Wow, you uhhh… you look good.” You knew you did, but you couldn’t say the same for him. 

“Looks like I can’t say the same about.” you replied.

“Wow. You still are that same feisty woman that I knew and loved.”

“What the fuck do you want Rami? How can I help you tonight? I’m out with some friends and it’s just my turn to get the drinks.”

“I don’t want anything. I just wanted to tell you that I miss you is all.”

“Rami, I miss you too, every day. It took me three months to stop crying, and I really wanted to apologize for everything I said that day, but I can’t take it back and I’m not sure I want to.”

“I wanted to apologize to you too, and to tell you that you weren’t wrong. The things you accused me of doing. I did cheat, and I got caught. I tried to lie, but I should have known better.”

You suddenly felt as if you’d been hit in the stomach and all you wanted to do was cry. 

“Thank you for finally admitting to the truth. I appreciate it. Look…. Oh God.. I’m going to regret this, but I’ve changed my number and I’ve blocked your old one. Is your number stilll the same?”

“No.”

“Give me your phone.” you demanded.

He doesn’t hesitate as he hands you his phone, you still remember his unlock pattern, so you swiped it and went into his ‘CONTACTS’ section. You entered your name and new number.

“Please Rami, don’t make me regret this.”

He smiled, a genuine toothy smile, the same one that he was famous for as he took his phone back.

“Can I give you a hug?” he asks.

“Sure I guess, why the hell not.”

He wraps his arms around you and squeezes tight, probably tighter than he should have, but you breath him in and a flood of memories came rushing back. The good, the bad, the truly ugly; you just wanted him back.

“Thank you” he says, with a smile.

He didn’t make you regret your decision to give you his number and over the next five months you’ve slowly allowed him back into your life. You’ve not been intimate but you’ve remained good friends. He slowly started to look healthier again, less gaunt and looking much more like he used to before you had left him. 

One day mid-September you suddenly started to feel really sad, and then you remembered. Your anniversary. You two would have been celebrating five years together.

You randomly call Rami and to see if he was available to come over, in which he stated that he was. You were nervous as he’d never actually been to your place before. It certainly wasn’t what he had become accustomed to over the past few years. This place was a dump. 

When he finally showed up, he just slowly walked around your apartment, not really commenting unless it’s a casual,”I like what you’ve done with your space. It feels so homey and so very you.”

He appeared oblivious to the reason for your sudden need to see him, and with an urgency you didn’t expect you pounced on him.

He was caught off guard by your sudden grip on his collar as you pulled him to you which resulted in him nearly tripping over the rug you had on the floor in your living room, your lips crashing into his with a force that almost made your teeth clash together.

Lips locked in a heated kiss, that had you whimpering with need in no time. You could feel him erection straining against his pants.

Moving towards your bedroom and wasting no time in shedding clothing, both of your hands going everywhere before his find out core, his fingers working their magic on you as you bucked your hips furiously against his hand. Your moans filling the small room. 

You came around his fingers with a cry of his name.

Looking up at him, silently begging, you felt him line himself up with your entrance as he slide into you roughly.

His hips pounding into yours, fucking into you with an animalistic urgency.

“OOOOHHHH GODDDDD YESSSSSSSS RAMIIIIIIIIII RAMIIIIII” you screamed

The bed rocking violently, headboard banging into the wall, like a beating drum

Your hands clawed at his back, and your hips moving in time to each others thrusts

“YESSS YN...THATS MY GIRL… CUM BABY… CUM FOR ME” he moaned 

His hands on your hips holding you steady as your walls began clenching around him for the second time that night, 

With another scream of his name, you came undone, body quaking, as you felt his cock twitch and he followed shortly with a shout of your name as he spilled his warm essence into you.

He collapsed on top of you, both of you just tangled together a sweaty panting mess

“That was the best possible makeup sex ever” he laughed into your hair.

“Yeah, like thirteen months later.” you pointed out, before somehow dissolving into a fit of giggles.

“So, what brought this on?”

“It would have been our five year anniversary in a few days, and I was sad. I decided that I wanted you back. You’ve proven to me that you’ve changed, and I still love you. So… can we almost pretend that these last thirteen month never happened? Do you really want me back Rami?”

He never said yes or no, instead he captured your lips in another kiss before he mumbled,”Give me a few minutes, and then we can really piss off your neighbors.”

You just giggle again, snuggle into his chest and tell him that you are happy to oblige, as you hate your neighbors. Because at least three times a week they have really loud fights, intense fights followed by what sounds like really intense makeup sex themselves. So that can’t even begin to judge you for getting laid in the year that you’ve lived here.

@txmel @xmxisxforxmaybe @itsme690 @mrhoemazzello @ramimedley @free-rami @r-ahh-mi

#Rami Malek #Rami Malek Reader #Ramie Malek Smut #Rami Malek Headcannon #Rami Malek Imagine #Rami Malek Blurb #Rami Malek fanfiction

[ourkinfolx]

No. 1: Fania

Fania Noel is a woman with plans. And not just the vast, sweeping plans like the dismantling of capitalism and black liberation. She also has smaller, but no less important, plans like brunch with friends, hitting the gym. 

“Every week, I put in my calendar the times I need to be efficient,” she explains. “So I put what time I work out, with my friends, my time to watch TV shows, to read. And after, I can give people the link to put obligations.”

The link she’s referring to is her online scheduling system connected to her personal website. It’s one I’ve become well acquainted with after our first two failed attempts to schedule interviews. We had plans to meet in person, in a Parisian Brasserie she’d recommended, but between canceled flights and buses, Skype turned out to be the most practical option. Our disrupted travel was just one in a long list of inconveniences brought on by the virus safety measures. It might even be said that the coronavirus also had plans. 

The global pandemic and subsequent slowing of—well, everything comes up a few times in our conversation. Like some of the other activists I’ve talked to, Fania sees a silver lining, an opportunity.

“This might be the only sequence of events in the history of humanity that you have the whole planet living at the same tempo, being in quarantine or locked down or slowed activity,” she says. 

“So we all have a lot of time to think about how [society is] fucked up or the weight of our lives in terms of this society. And I think we have to ask if we want to go back to this rushed kind of living. It’s really a game changer.”

I first heard of Fania, a Haitian born afro-feminist, earlier in the year, while talking to a Parisian friend about the need for more black spaces in the city. She angrily described how a few years ago, Fania tried to have an event for black women, only to be met with fierce backlash and derision from not just right-wing groups, but anti-racist and anti-Semitic groups. The event wasn’t actually Fania’s alone; it was an effort by Mwasi Collective, a French afro-feminist group that she’s involved with. 

Either way, it was a minor scandal. Hotly debated on French TV and radio. Even Anne Hidalgo, Paris’s mayor, voiced disapproval. Critics claimed the event, called Nyansapo Festival, was racist itself by exclusion because most of the space had been designated for black women only. 

Despite all the fuss, the Nyansapo Festival went on as planned. Several years later, following the killing of George Floyd and the international movement that followed, Anne Hidalgo published a tweet ending with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. I found it curious, she’s always struck me as more of an #AllLivesMatter type. 

I ask Fania if, given the tweet and possible change of heart from the mayor, she thinks her event would be better received in the current climate. She points out that there had been two Nyansapo Festivals since, with little to no media coverage, but seems overall uninterested in rehashing the drama. 

“We’re way beyond that now,” she says, shaking her head. She ends it in a way that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever been almost imperceptibly corrected by a black woman, and I quickly move on to the next topic. 

It’s not until later, when reading some of her other interviews, that I’m able to fully contextualize our exchange. It’s common for activists, especially those working in or belonging to a culture where their identity makes them a minority, to be asked to view their work through the lens of conditional acceptance of a larger group of oppressors and/or gatekeepers. Asking feminists what men think, asking LGBT how they plan to placate heterosexuals. In her dismissal, Fania resists the line of questioning altogether, and in another interview, she makes the point more succinctly when explaining why she doesn’t believe in the concept of public opinion: 

“As an activist, the core ‘public’ is black people and to think about the antagonism and balance of power in terms of our politics rather than its reception. It’s normal in a racist, capitalist, patriarchal society that a political [movement] proposing the abolition of the system is not welcomed.”

One might argue if you’re not pissing anyone off, you’re not doing anything important. 

Rolling Stone’s July cover is a painting featuring a dark-skinned black woman, braids pulled into a round bun on her crown. She has George Floyd’s face on her T-shirt and an American flag bandana around her neck. One of her hands is raised in a fist, the other holds the hand of a young black boy next to her. Behind her, a crowd, some with fists also raised, carry signs with phrases like Our Lives Matter and Justice For All Now. 

According to Rolling Stone, they tasked the artist, Kadir Nelson, with creating something hopeful and inspirational and he “immediately thought of Eugène Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People,’ the iconic 1830 painting that depicts a woman leading the French Revolution.”

Regarding his choice to center a black woman in the piece, he explains: “The people who were pushing for those changes were African American women. They are very much at the forefront in spearheading this change, so I thought it was very important for an African American woman to be at the very center of this painting, because they have very much been at the center of this movement.”

During our call, I mention the painting and ask Fania her thoughts on why, so often, we find black women at the forefront of any social justice or human rights movement.

“Women have always organized,” she says simply. “Women work collectively, they run organizations.” She points to the church and organized religion as an example. 

“Look at the composition of church. Who’s going to church, who’s going to ask for help from God?”

Anyone who’s spent time in the houses of worship for a patriarchal religion has vivid memories of the very present men in the room. From the booming voices and squared shoulders of the pulpit to the stern, sometimes shaming looks of brothers, uncles, fathers. But the women, often more numerous, run the councils and the choirs. Around the world women pray more, attend church and are generally more religious. And the men?

“In a context of church, it’s really acceptable to ask for help from God. Because it’s God,” Fania says. “But you don’t have a lot of black men, a lot of men in any kind of church.”

That isn’t to say that men, especially black men, are complacent. Fania notes that traditional activism goes against the patriarchy’s narrow view of masculinity. 

Activism, she explains, requires one to acknowledge they’ve been a victim of a system before they can demand power. And for a lot of men, that’s not an option. 

“They want to be seen as strong,” she says. “As leaders. They want to exert control.”

In short, both black men and women acknowledge the system would have us powerless, but while women organize to collectively dismantle it, men tend to stake out on their own to dominate it. 

Black capitalism as resistance isn’t new, and was more prominent during the civil rights movement, which was largely led by men. In 1968, Roy Innis, co-national director for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) opined, 

“We are past the stage where we can talk seriously of whites acting toward blacks out of moral imperatives.” While CORE’s other director, Floyd McKissick, reasoned, 

“If a Black man has no bread in his pocket, the solution to his problem is not integration; it’s to get some bread.”

More recently the dynamics of this played out in real time on Twitter as Telfar, a black, queer-owned fashion label, sent out notifications of a handbag restock only to be immediately descended upon by a group of largely black, male resellers. Telfar describes itself as affordable luxury for everyone, and for many of the black women who buy Telfar, it exists as proof that class and fashion need not be so inextricably linked. But for the men who bulk purchased the bags just to triple the price and resell, these were just more items to wring capital out of on their quest to buy a seat at the table. 

Of course, it’s not unreasonable to argue that the purchase of a product, regardless of who makes it, as a path to liberation is still black capitalism. And in another interview, Fania specifically warns against this type of consumption. “Neoliberal Afrofeminism is more focused on representation, making the elite more diverse, and integration. This kind of afrofeminism is very media compatible. Like great Konbini-style videos about hair, lack of shades of makeup, and [other forms of] commodification.” But, she explains, “The goal is a mass movement where our people are involved, not just passively or as consumers.” 

But can consumption be divorced from black liberation if it’s such a key aspect in how so many black people organize? I bring up all the calls to “buy black” that happened in the wake of George Floyd. Some of it could be attributed to the cabin-fever induced retail therapy we all engaged in during quarantine. And for those of us who, for whatever reason, were unable to add our bodies to a protest, money seemed like an easy thing to offer. Buy a candle. A tub of shea butter. A tube of lip gloss. But what did it all really accomplish, in retrospect?

“We have to think about solidarity,” Fania explains. “Solidarity is a project. When we say support black-owned business, we still have to think about the goal, the project. So if we support coffee shops, bookshops, hair dressers that have a special place in the community and are open to the community and in conversation with the community, it’s good and it can help. But if it’s just to make some individual black people richer, it’s really limited.”

Black capitalism vs anti-capitalism remains an ongoing debate, but shouldn’t be a distraction. In the end, everyone will contribute how they best see fit and we still share a common goal. Besides, we’ll need all hands on deck to best make use of our current momentum. And that’s something Fania underscores in one of the last points she makes during our conversation:

“Something we have to repeat to people is that these protests: keep doing them. Because you have years and years of organization behind you. People came out against police brutality and a week later we’re talking about how we move towards the abolition of police, how we go towards the abolition of prison. How we move towards the end of capitalism. And this is possible because you have a grassroots organization thinking about the question even when no one else was asking it. So now we have the New York Times and the media asking if these things are possible. But that’s because even when we didn’t have the spotlight, we were working on the questions about the world after. And every day radical organizations, black liberation organizations, are thinking about the world after and the end of this system. And when protests and revolts happen, we can get there and say ‘we have a plan for this.’”