#it also helped that i updated the results like every 20 responses or so rather than counting them all at the end

[vierschanzentournee]

Ski Jumping Survey 2020/21 - The Results

So, 2020/21 was… a season. It’s certainly had its ups and downs, but I’m grateful that we were able to have the majority of a season, including the world championships, despite whatever the hell has been going on the in the wider world!

Luckily, there’s no reason that coronavirus should have an impact on my third end-of-season survey — in fact, I got an absolutely awesome 103 responses this year! For reference, last year I got 68, and the year before that I got 66. I don’t know whether my survey just reached more people this year, or whether the ski jumping family on Tumblr has grown, but either way I’m super happy.

The results for overall favourite jumpers were scored the same way as usual: a vote for favourite was worth 3 points, a vote for second favourite was worth 2, and a vote for third favourite was worth 1. The jumpers were ranked based on their total number of points, which meant that the most popular World Cup ski jumpers this year were…

Maren Lundby & Daniel-André Tande

I always knew this season would be an interesting one for my survey (...and yes, I do start thinking about it quite a bit in advance), because the male winner of the previous two years, Stephan Leyhe, wouldn’t be an option due to his injury. Daniel, however, wasn’t a completely unexpected winner — he came second to Stephan last year. I do wonder whether Daniel got an extra little boost because of his terrible fall in Planica at the end of the season, which meant he was very much at the forefront of everyone’s minds, but I’ve got no way to confirm or deny that! The full results for the men are below - if two jumpers had the same number of points, ranking was based on who had the highest number of votes for favourite (if that was identical, it then went down to who had the highest number of votes for second favourite). If two jumpers share a ranking, it means they had the exact same distribution of votes.

1. Tande (78 points)

2. Stoch (57)

3. Geiger (57)

4. Granerud (51)

5. Eisenbichler (38)

6. Boyd-Clowes (31)

7. Schlierenzauer (30)

8. P Prevc (27)

9. Lindvik (26)

10. Wellinger (22)

11. R Kobayashi (18)

12. Stekala (16)

13. D Prevc (15)

14. Y Sato (15)

15. Lanisek (12)

16. Pavlovcic (12)

17. Freund (10)

18. Freitag (8)

19. Hayboeck (8)

20. Wolny (7)

21. Aalto (7)

22. Nakamura (6)

23. D Huber (6)

24. Hamann (6)

25. Kubacki & Kraft (5)

26. Schmid (5)

27. Johansson (5)

28. C Prevc & Jelar & Semenic (4)

29. Fettner (4)

30. Kot (3)

31. Klimov (3)

32. Paschke (2)

33. Forfang (2)

34. Kytosaho & Aigro & Markeng & Aschenwald (1)

Karl Geiger defends his third place from last year, while Kamil Stoch jumps a few places from 5th to second (perhaps courtesy of his third Four Hills victory this year?). Obviously, the biggest winner here is Halvor Egner Granerud, who has gone from only 2 points last year (when he struggled immensely in the World Cup and finished with only a few points) to finishing fourth with 8.28% of the vote (Tande had 12.66%, while Stoch and Geiger had 9.25% each). Others who have moved up include Eisenbichler (from 10th to 5th) and Stekala (who I believe did not compete in the World Cup last year and so wasn’t available as an option, but has clearly won a lot of hearts this season). Conversely, there are also a few who seem to have lost out — Marius Lindvik fell from 4th place to 9th, while Andreas Wellinger, who wasn’t an option last year due to his injury but dominated the non-World Cup vote, could only manage 10th in comparison to his second place in 2019.

The women saw another season of dominance from Maren Lundby in this survey, although not so much on the hill. The full results for the women are:

1. Lundby (103 points)

2. Takanashi (85)

3. Kramer (62)

4. Althaus (57)

5. Kriznar (52)

6. Opseth (50)

7. Freitag (19)

8. Klinec & Pinkelnig (15)

9. Vogt (13)

10. Hoelzl (13)

11. Rogelj (12)

12. Iraschko-Stolz (11)

13. Voros (11)

14. Rupprecht (9)

15. Karpiel (8)

16. Bjoerseth (7)

17. Pagnier (6)

18. Twardosz (4)

19. Rajda (4)

20. Avvakumova & Stroem & Haralambie (3)

21. Maruyama (2)

22. L Malsiner & Strate (2)

23. Kvandal & Ito & Eder & Seyfarth & Iwabuchi & Brecl (1)

Although Lundby has secured the win yet again, her share of the vote is a little lower this time at 16.74%, compared to 21.27% in 2020. Sara Takanashi has overtaken Katharina Althaus for second place, but undoubtedly the highest climber is Sara Marita Kramer, who received no votes at all last year (despite ranking 9th in the overall World Cup), but this year won 10.06% of the women’s vote. Many other results were largely stable — Kriznar, Opseth, and Freitag are in the same area of the rankings as they were last year — but Ema Klinec made some gains, moving up from 15th to 8th.

The votes for favourite teams were simply added up, and the team with the most votes won. For the men, the rankings were:

1. Norway (34 votes)

2. Poland & Germany (23)

3. Slovenia (9)

4. Austria (7)

5. Japan (4)

6. Finland (1)

7. France (1)

Interestingly, the Norwegians have overtaken the Germans — possibly this has something to do with the Germans essentially losing their two most popular jumpers, Wellinger and Leyhe, while the Norwegians saw excellent results from Halvor Egner Granerud. Poland have also overtaken Slovenia, by a significant margin, which I’m not entirely sure I can explain!

For the women, the rankings were:

1. Norway (28 votes)

2. Slovenia (24)

3. Germany (19)

4. Austria (12)

5. Japan (9)

6. Poland (3)

7. Russia (2)

8. France (1)

Again, Norway have taken the lead from Germany. Slovenia have jumped from fourth to second, leapfrogging both Austria and Germany, while Japan are steadily catching up to Austria too. 2020/21 was a strong season for the Slovenian women on the whole, with Nika Kriznar winning the overall and Ema Klinec becoming a world champion, which perhaps explains why they’ve been on people’s minds more often.

The vote for favourite male athlete who didn’t compete in the World Cup this season wasn’t actually quite as much of a slaughter as I’d thought it would be — the winner was exactly who you think it is, but others mounted a strong challenge!

1. Leyhe (29 votes)

2. Fannemel (12)

3. Gangnes (9)

4. Bickner (8)

5. Morgenstern (6)

6. Kasai (5)

7. Pedersen & Peier (3)

8. Hautamaki (2)

9. Stjernen & Schmitt & Ahonen & Malysz & Raimund & S Huber & Larinto & Hannawald & Descombes Sevoie & Kranjec & Aune & Hilde (1)

There was a far greater variety of answers this year, probably thanks to the much larger sample size - so while roughly a third of respondents were still missing Stephan, plenty of people also found room in their hearts for long-time absentees like Fannemel, recent retirees like Gangnes and Kranjec, those relegated to the Continental Cup or below like Kasai and Pedersen, or those who have long since retired but whom we still miss, like Morgenstern, Schmitt, and Malysz.

The same question didn’t get a huge amount of responses for the women:

1. Hendrickson (8 votes)

2. Seifreidsberger (3)

3. N Prevc & Wuerth (2)

4. Sagen & Straub & Van & Iakovleva & M Malsiner (1)

Sarah Hendrickson, one of the first legends of women’s ski jumping who announced her retirement at the end of this season, was at the front of many respondents’ minds — others were looking towards the future with Nika Prevc, the younger sister of Peter, Cene, and Domen.

It’s a little bit difficult to compare the results for favourite tournament each year, as 2 out of the 3 years I’ve run the survey have seen the cancellation of various tournaments. The one consistent, however, has been the Four Hills Tournament, which still remains the favourite of most of the fanbase:

1. Four Hills Tournament (75 votes)

2. Planica7 (14)

3. Willingen Six (13)

I didn’t ask about favourite podiums this year, as the headache it caused me last year was not worth repeating, no matter how interesting the comparisons might be!

One of my favourite elements of this survey is the predictions. The most popular predictions for the winners of season 19/20 were correct; the predictions for 20/21, however, were much less accurate — no one at all saw Granerud coming, and only one person correctly predicted that Nika Kriznar would win the women’s World Cup. The most popular predictions to win this season were Geiger (who finished 6th, after a busy season which involved catching Covid-19, welcoming a baby daughter, and winning a variety of ski flying and world championship medals) and Lundby (who finished 8th, struggling to find her best form in early World Cup competitions but hitting a groove towards the end of the season and winning several world championship medals). Inspired by this rather topsy-turvy season, we’ve got a wide variety of predictions for next year:

1. Geiger (29 votes)

2. R Kobayashi (17)

3. Eisenbichler (12)

4. Lanisek (8)

5. Pavlovcic (5)

6. Lindvik (5)

7. Stoch & Granerud & D Huber (4)

8. D Prevc (3)

9. Boyd-Clowes (2)

10. Y Sato & Zajc & Fannemel & P Prevc & Schlierenzauer & Kubacki (1)

Interestingly, not many people seem to think Granerud can do it twice in a row — this certainly fits the pattern we’ve seen over the past few decades, with the last male jumper to win two consecutive titles being Janne Ahonen in 2003/04 and 2004/05. Despite his failure to deliver on the overall title this year, Karl Geiger has again received a vote of confidence, while his teammate Eisenbichler is being seriously considered for the title for the first time. There’s also a lot of support here for jumpers who haven’t even had a World Cup victory: Lanisek, Pavlovcik, Huber, and Boyd-Clowes have never won a competition. There are a few other long shots here too, considering that Fannemel has been out for three consecutive seasons (and isn’t even confirmed to be jumping next season), and Schlierenzauer finished 65th in the World Cup this season (although it’s of course worth noting that Granerud was 61st last season, and we all know that Gregor knows how to win!)

There’s far less variety to be found among the women:

1. Kramer (49 votes)

2. Takanashi (13)

3. Lundby (11)

4. Opseth (6)

5. Kriznar (3)

6. Klinec (2)

Again, not many people think Kriznar can do it twice in a row — instead, all eyes are on Sara Marita Kramer, who came within touching distance of the crystal globe this year but was stymied by various cancelled competitions. This is the first year that Lundby hasn’t been the fandom’s top prediction, and it seems that when it rains for her, it pours, because she’s not even the second choice. That title goes to Sara Takanashi, who hasn’t won an overall title since 2016/17 but who finished second to Kriznar this season.

Sadly, only one of the jumpers tipped for a first victory last year actually managed to achieve one this season — Nika Kriznar. Many of the other favourite picks, such as Constantin Schmid, Philipp Aschenwald, and Ziga Jelar instead suffered something of a downturn in form, while others like Anze Lanisek and Silje Opseth have performed well, but not quite well enough for a win. This year’s votes are:

1. Lanisek (21 votes)

2. Stekala (20)

3. Pavlovcic (17)

4. Opseth (9)

5. Boyd-Clowes (6)

6. Schmid (3)

7. Bjoerseth (2)

8. Jelar & Nakamura & C Prevc & Pedersen (1)

Towards the end of the season, Pavlovcic in particular seemed to be knocking on the door of victory; Lanisek was a consistent top 10 finisher; and Stekala achieved his very first podium. It’ll be interesting to see where these jumpers go next year, and I hope that it’s not quite as much of a curse as it was last year!

As ever, the final part of the survey was focused on demographics — who are the ski jumping family?

According to this year’s survey, the average ski jumping fan on Tumblr is 21.6 years old, a German-speaker who is from and lives in Germany, and has been watching ski jumping for slightly over 7 years!

I put together charts showing the data collected about respondents’ country of origin, country of residence, age, languages, and time watching ski jumping:

So, all there’s left to do now is thank everyone who took the survey for their invaluable contributions to “science” — thank you to @telemarcs @queen-maren @na-woke-i-nakamura​ @damn-d4niel @louddreaming @skiijumpingg @hill-record @june-skijumping @ificouldflyhigh @flautist10 @blueplastichairbrush @vixmise @skijumping-is-my-aesthetics @startgate13 @lewanarta @oneoutof @sportschaos @sparflamme @anagraves @turquoiseheart1 @jumpingtodreams @entropuff @paringeverywhere @omi-om @blueberryfriday @rpntws @jokkeblobfish @reindeersonmytshirt @ski-jumper-stan @cryingismyonlyhobby @itsloveit @mlledevoltaire @prinshoppmarius @skiijumpinng @czarnewino @ski-schlieri @badlandings @one-more-jump @ilovenearlyeverything @iliketheusual @lipasworld @jensontodd @scandinavianbyheartt @ryoyuftw @sarcasticlilkid @moon-ascendant @eksperimentgaj @damnconfused @flegm-a @witchsdog @byeseefeld @stephanleyhes @anttiaaltostan @magioghvitetekopper @merlex93, the person who gave me an Instagram username when asked for a Tumblr username, and, last but not least, the person who replied “wouldnt you like to know weatherboy” when asked for a URL. I will never know who you are, but I love you.

#ski jumping #survey 20/21 #apologies to the people whose tag didn't work - tumblr does that and i have #no idea why or what the logic behind it is #anyway this year i figured out how to make google sheets do maths FOR ME #so i had a far less terrible time doing it this year! #it also helped that i updated the results like every 20 responses or so rather than counting them all at the end #and also not letting people type into the 'years watching' box was a big improvement #bc youse are all so keen to share your entire life stories :/ #mine: ski jumping

[jungwookjins]

word count: 5.4k

summary: Three times Tim should’ve realized Martin’s feelings for Jon, and one time Martin told him.

i let myself write five thousand words of s1 archival crew fluff instead of doing work i should be doing, as a treat

“So,” Tim starts just as the lights in the pub flicker for a half second, making this all seem much more dramatic than it actually is, “Who is it?”

Martin already knows what Tim is on about but feigns ignorance all the same, for his own sake, “Who’s what?”

“You clearly have a crush on someone.” 

“Crush? We’re not in high school, Tim.” Martin continues to object but Tim cuts him off. 

“Ah no, don’t say you don’t, nothing gets past me. Sometimes, you’re just extra smiley at work, and I know you don’t actually find researching statements of horrible encounters to be that entertaining, so it’s clearly something else. Or rather, someone else,” he waggles his eyebrows for effect, “Sash knows what I’m talking about, yeah?”

Sasha rolls her eyes amusedly but, ever the mediator, doesn’t push Martin for more information, “I do, but Martin, it’s okay, you know you don’t have to humor him.”

“Oh c’mon,” Tim puts on a pout so over-exaggerated, it has both Martin and Sasha stifling giggles, “You guys are no fun. I promise I won’t tell anyone. What happens at Morpeth Arms, stays at Morpeth Arms,” his face screws up a little, “Eh, we’ll workshop that one.” 

“Hm,” Martin starts, then hesitates, and Tim is intimately familiar with this dilemma. The age-old question of to tell or not to tell because the former makes it all mortifyingly real, but the latter is only tenable for so long. He settles on what he would like to think is a compromise, “Okay fine, tell you what, I won’t tell you outright, but if you guess, I’ll tell you if you’re right or wrong.” He hastily adds a limit of “Five guesses,” probably to maintain some facade of not wanting to tell Tim at all.

“Alright, that’s fair, uh, Richard in research?” If he’s being honest, there is absolutely no rhyme or reason to Tim’s guesses beyond all of them being people he’s seen Martin interact with. He likes to say nothing gets past him, but this clearly has, to an extent.

“Mmh mh,” Martin shakes his head lightly.

“Rosie?”

“Nah.”

“Edmund in artefact storage?”

“Nope,” he says, popping the p. “Two more guesses left.”

Sasha pipes up, “Ooh, Oliver? The new bloke in accounting?”

“Uh uh, only ever talked to him once so far. One left.”

Sasha and Tim think for a moment while Martin twiddles his thumbs nervously, then, “Wait,” Tim looks as if a lightbulb has struck and shattered across his head, “Wait, Martin, it’s not—it’s not Jon, is it?”

And Martin’s silence accompanied by the blush slowly creeping its way up his neck is answer enough.

“No way! Wait, really?” Tim wears an expression of amused disbelief at the fact that his Hail Mary guess turned out to be correct. Sasha at least has the good sense to school her face into some semblance of neutrality.

The blush deepens, and Martin resolves that if anyone brings it up, now or in the future, he’ll just blame it on the alcohol, no matter how shoddy an excuse that is. He answers affirmatively, but voice tentative, “Yeah?”

“Whew, never would’ve guessed that one in a thousand years.” Tim sits back in the cheap vinyl covered booth, then adds, “Though, I guess I just did,” he’s still a bit shocked, but as memories come welling up to the surface, he realizes that, in hindsight, it was really quite obvious.

***

The first clue must’ve not been more than a few months after Jon was promoted to Head Archivist. Martin had always been of the caretaker type, and Tim had picked up on this rather quickly. He frequently made them all tea, and definitely did whenever they had to stay past five to catch up on research. When statements piled high, and they were all close to tearing their hair out from stress, he always made sure they took a proper lunch break. And most endearingly, he insisted on going out for a small celebration whenever it was any of their birthdays. But with Jon, it was different, more than just Martin’s regular caretaking instinct manifesting itself.

Once, Tim was in the break room fetching his lunch from the fridge when Martin walked in, mug in hand, and purpose on his face. He put the kettle on, leaned against the counter, and turned towards Tim, “Do you know how Jon takes his tea?”

“Can’t say I do, why?”

“Oh, nothing, it’s not that important,” Martin sighed, a wee bit of frustration creeping into his voice.

“Does he not like what you usually bring him?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think he does? He never finishes it.”

“Why don’t you just ask him? Maybe he doesn’t like tea at all.”

“No,” Another sigh. “That’s not it. He definitely drinks tea, and I know he definitely likes tea because he always takes a sip almost right after I put it on his desk. If he didn’t like tea, I doubt he’d bother doing that, much less every time.”

And after that, Tim made a mental note that Martin was much more observant than anyone, Martin himself included, gave him credit for. Tim hummed in response while putting his lunch in the microwave as Martin waited for the kettle to boil. 

After it boiled and the tea was steeped, Martin poured a splash of milk in and began spooning in sugar. “I just added one sugar last time, maybe I’ll try two this time,” he said in that tone that meant he didn’t really expect or need a response, he just wanted to keep Tim updated. 

This happened a few more times over the next couple of weeks, Martin walking into the break room while Tim, and sometimes Sasha also, were in there doing something or other, mildly frustrated and intent on tweaking the ratio of tea to milk to sugar until he found one that Jon liked. 

From what Tim could tell, both through quiet observation as well as Martin telling him, he had the method down to a science, changing each variable one at a time, so he could nail down exactly how Jon reacted to each ingredient. First, as he had mentioned, was the sugar, which he began to increase until it was quite clear from the slight grimace on Jon’s face after the third experiment cup that it was far too sweet. Martin then tried lowering the amount of sugar until he settled on just shy of no sugar, about half a teaspoon. Then, he had to work on the tea to milk ratio; he decided to reduce the amount of milk first, figuring out loud that more people took their tea with little or no milk than the other way around. This didn’t seem to yield the results he was looking for.

At two in the afternoon on the Friday of this second week of experimenting, Tim found Martin in the break room before the two of them and Sasha were due in Jon’s office for a quick meeting, adding milk to a mug with determination.

He turned when he heard Tim, “Do you want one? There’s still some water in the kettle.”

“No thanks, just had a coffee with lunch. You think that one’s the one?”

“Yeah, I think so. If I’m right, then Jon apparently takes his tea with barely any sugar and a lot of milk, like a third of the mug is milk.”

Tim exhaled a laugh, “What a weirdo, of course that’s how he takes his tea, in a way that no one could possibly guess right on the first try.”

Tim grabbed a cold pastry from the fridge and stopped on his way out the door, “Ready? Need any help with those?” He tilted his chin towards the two mugs of tea Martin was carrying.

“Nah, I got it,” he answered, and the two of them headed to Jon’s office.

Jon glanced up from a statement when they entered and muttered a cursory “Hello.” Sasha was already there, sat on one of the chairs in front of Jon’s desk, trying to make some polite small talk with him with semi-success. Martin took the other chair while Tim leaned against a bookshelf next to Jon’s desk as he preferred to do in these meetings. 

Martin set one of the mugs on Jon’s desk with a barely audible, “Here Jon, tea.”

Jon nodded in acknowledgment and perhaps in thanks? Tim could never quite tell. “Right, so,” he began once it was clear everyone was settled, “the Hill Top Road statements are all a bit of a mess, and I think we should probably go through and organize them all again.” Jon continued on, explaining how he expected them to reorganize and refile them, with no dearth of complaints about how Gertrude left the archives, and these statements especially, in such a mess that it was, “a miracle she wasn’t fired in her first week.”

Throughout it all, Tim saw Martin’s eyes every so often flicking back to the mug of tea that Jon now had in his hand and was taking periodic sips from. Fifteen minutes into the meeting and Jon had finished the entire mug of tea, and Tim certainly did not miss how Martin’s eyes practically glowed with contentment, though he made an impressive and mostly successful attempt at keeping a ridiculously wide smile from his face, such that anyone not paying at least a little attention wouldn’t twig that anything had happened at all.

***

The second occasion coming to mind was last fall, the one and only time that Jon had shown up late to work. It was a particularly cold November morning, it couldn’t have been over two degrees, and it was raining. The cold was the kind that clung to the skin, then sunk into the bones. The kind that, when you’re in it, you feel you’ll never recover from it, no matter how much time you spend in front of the fireplace. And all of that didn’t even include the wind. But Tim, chipper as always, waltzed into the office two minutes past nine, with a latte in hand, and a “Morning boss! Sorry I’m late,” called towards the general direction of Jon’s office. 

“Hi Tim,” Sasha looked up from her computer, smiled at Tim, then looked towards Jon’s office, “Jon’s not in yet, actually.”

“Oh? Jon? Late to work?” He glanced around the archives, searching as he shucked off his coat, “Huh, Martin’s not here either,” a thought began to form in his head, “Wait, Sash, you don’t think—” he was cut off by the sound of Martin entering the archives from the break room, and the thought evaporated as soon as it had condensed. 

“He’s still not—oh hi Tim—he’s still not here yet?” he asked Sasha on his way back to his desk, mug of tea in hand.

“Nope, but I’m sure he’s fine Martin, tube probably just ran late.”

“Yeah maybe,” he clearly wasn’t convinced, “but he’s usually like fifteen minutes early. Rare that the tube is that late.”

“Maybe the wind blew him over into a puddle,” Tim joked. Sasha laughed lightly, but Martin looked positively distraught at the possibility.

Sasha decided to join in on the ribbing, “Maybe he couldn’t decide which white, off white, or grey dress shirt to wear today.” This one drew something like a hesitant laugh from Martin, but the worry was still visible on his face.

Tim and Sasha continued this for a few minutes, with Martin reacting in mixed amounts of horror, amusement, and concern while tapping away at something on his computer. “Maybe,” Tim started, interrupting himself with laughter, “May—” More laughter. “Maybe he thought today was the day to—”

It was at this moment that the door to the archives swung upon just a bit too hard, hitting the wall it was hinged on, stopping Tim mid-sentence. In the doorframe stood Jon, absolutely sodden, hair sticking up in all directions, glasses askew, looking far too weary for fifteen past nine in the morning. He looked less like he had been caught unexpectedly in a bit of rain and more like he had lost a fight to the River Thames. 

“Jon!” Martin squeaked, taken truly aback by the state he was in.

Tim reacted at the same time, overlapping with Martin’s worry, “Woah, boss! You alright? Did the rain get that bad?”

“Pimlico was closed, so I had to get off the tube at Victoria,” he answered tersely.

“Yeah, but was Victoria flooded or something?” Tim decided to pursue this line of questioning, half to tease Jon, half out of genuine curiosity.

“No.” Jon replied irritably, evidently eager to end the conversation and headed towards his office.

That’s when Tim noticed what he was holding in his hands. Or rather, what he was distinctly not holding, “Did you forget your umbrella?”

Jon stopped before disappearing past the door to his office, “If you must know, I couldn’t find it this morning.”

“Huh.” Tim turned back to the rest of the assistants, “See Martin, Sash was right! He’s fine, mostly.”

“Fine?” Martin started, loud enough that Tim was sure the entire basement level of the institute could hear. Maybe even Elias on the top floor too, if he was paying close enough attention. Startled by the volume of his own voice, Martin lowered it by at least three hundred percent, “Fine? He looked like he was about to keel over!”

“He’ll be fine once he dries off,” Tim tried to calm Martin’s, undue, in his own opinion, stress, but he was already on his way to the break room, no doubt, to make a cup of tea for Jon, “though maybe a bit crankier than usual. We better not muck up these statements then, I guess.”

Martin returned from the break room a few minutes later with, as Tim expected, a mug of tea in hand and knocked on the door to Jon’s office. A muffled “Come in,” and Martin opened the door and stepped inside, leaving the door ajar. 

The walls were thin enough and the door open enough that Tim could hear all of Martin’s words and most of Jon’s. 

“Here,” Sound of ceramic on wood. “You okay? Do you need anything?”

“No, thank you, Martin, I’m alright.”

“Are you sure? Are you cold? I can ask Rosie to turn up the heating down here if you are.”

“No, it’s okay, I’ll be fine—” The sound of wheels on wood as Sasha rolled her chair to the other side of her desk obscured the second half of that sentence, “—and just make sure you get the follow up to the Vittery statement to me this afternoon.”

“Yep, will do. Let me know if you need anything.” Martin returned to his desk and resumed work on what Tim guessed was probably the Vittery statement, but not without shooting concerned glances in the direction of Jon’s office for the next hour. Martin continued his fretting throughout the day, checking up on him at least every other hour, and bringing him far more tea than a man could want to drink in an eight hour workday. 

It was ten past five in the afternoon when Martin packed up his things and walked to Jon’s door. Sasha had already left, and Tim was only still there because he was expecting a call from Sergeant Northam from the precinct about a missing persons report for case 0112905, and he really didn’t care to deal with the hassle of rescheduling. So, he waited for the phone on his desk to ring while tapping away at the mobile in his hands, and listened to whatever was unfolding at the threshold to Jon’s office. Not that he was trying to eavesdrop, it’s just it was quiet in the archives, naturally, as it was past five, and there was nothing else to draw his attention.

Martin knocked and stepped barely inside, “Jon? Are you headed home right now? It’s just it’s, ah-it’s still raining, and I know you forgot—oh, or, er, lost your umbrella and I’m heading home right now and Pimlico station is still closed—I checked—and Victoria is on my way so, uh, if you wanted to, or well, if you were planning on leaving around now we could walk to the station and you could share my umbrella? I-if you wanted.”

There was a beat of silence before Jon answered, voice lacking most of the sharpness it usually had, “Oh, thank you Martin, but I’ll probably be here another hour, there’s a few statements I have to sort out first.”

“Oh, uh yeah, no problem. I’ll see you tomorrow then?”

“See you tomorrow, Martin.”

Martin stepped back out and closed the door to Jon’s office. He took two steps towards the staircase that led up to the ground floor of the institute before turning back, taking his umbrella from his bag, and leaning it against Jon’s door so he’d see it next he left the office. Then he headed back to the staircase, calling a goodbye to Tim over his shoulder. 

The call from the precinct came not a minute later, and as soon as it was over, Tim left, so he didn’t see Jon’s reaction to the umbrella. But the next morning, he arrived (slightly early, actually) to see the umbrella on Martin’s empty desk, and Jon definitely did not complain about Martin’s handwriting or follow up notes for at least a week after.

***

The final, and perhaps most obvious, was the institute holiday party last December. The holiday parties were always confusing and mildly uncomfortable events, organized and hosted by the operations department. They always tried to make these as fun and relaxed as possible, but the general tone of The Magnus Institute wasn’t exactly conducive to that. 

Still, Tim was looking forward to it. The festive season was one of his favorite times of the year, second only to Halloween. Not that he had any sentimental or religious reason to like Christmas, but something about the fact that his family never really celebrated it that much drew him to it. Sasha had already agreed to go, though she was probably already planning on it before Tim had asked. She usually went to these for at least a couple hours each year, something about networking. Martin was out following up on a statement in Waterloo, so Tim would ask him when he got back. Now, though, he could try his hand at convincing Jon, but if he was being honest with himself, he wasn’t too optimistic about it, no matter how persuasive he could be.

He knocked twice on the door to Jon’s office, hand already on the handle when he heard the “Come in.”

“Hiya boss, you coming to the party later?”

At this, Jon looked up from the statement on his desk in mild confusion, “The what?”

“You know, the institute holiday party? Don’t tell me you forgot it was today, Rosie’s been reminding everyone all week!”

“I didn’t forget.” (He clearly had.) “But, no, there are, uh, too many things I need to work on here, I won’t be going.”

“Aw come on Jon, you’re always working. You’re here before everyone in the archives and leave after everyone. According to Martin, sometimes you don’t even leave at all. You can take a few hours and join in on the festivities, yeah?”

“I’ll,” he let out a put upon exhale, “I’ll think about it.”

“Alright! That’s the spirit.” Tim turned to go but not before leaving Jon with, “But don’t think too long, it’s already half past three,” and a wink before he closed the door. 

“Any luck?” asked Sasha, who was crouched next to a file cabinet and rifling through the folders in the bottom drawer.

“Sort of? He said he’d ‘think about it,’” Tim answered, punctuating it with air quotes. “Whatcha looking for?” He took one glance and let out a low whistle at the state of disarray the cabinet was in. 

“Precinct called about sending reports for the Hodge statement? But I could have sworn they already sent them.”

“Hodge? Which one was that one?”

“One-night stand gone wrong.”

“Oh, that one! Yeah, they already sent us the preliminary report, but I got Sergeant Northam to agree to sending us the full investigation file.”

“How’d you swing that one?” she asked, equal parts impressed and amused.

“Let’s just say,” he took a seat in his desk chair and let it roll closer to where Sasha was by the filing cabinet, “Northam has a particular affinity for cronuts. Especially the strawberry iced ones. And Jon lets me claim these outings on the institute expense receipts, so…”

She laughed, “You’re ridiculous, but I’m not complaining. They said they could have someone send the files over next week, or one of us could go down to the precinct and pick them up ourselves if we want them sooner.” 

“I can go grab them tomorrow morning.” 

“Great, thanks, I’ll let Jon know. Any word on when Martin’s going to be back?”

As if he was summoned, the two of them heard quick footsteps on the staircase outside the archives, and Martin appeared in the doorway shortly after, “Hi guys,” he took a seat at his desk, setting the canvas messenger bag with a statement file poking out of the top on the floor.

“Martin!” Tim greeted him, but not hearing, Martin continued.

 “I swear, that trip was worth less than not going at all. Spent three hours waiting around at the hospital only to be told they wouldn’t be speaking to anyone from ‘the public’ about it.”

“Rough,” Tim sympathized. But he had more pressing matters to ask Martin about than case 0121102, “You going to the party later?”

“Uh, maybe. Is Jon going?” 

“Dunno, I asked him earlier, and he said he’d think about it. Sasha and I will be there, though. Come on, it’ll be fun!”

“Fun might be a little generous for these institute parties, but yeah, I’ll go.”

“Yay! Sash, d’you hear that? Martin said he’ll go too.”

“Mmh hmm,” she hummed cheerfully in response. 

The three of them spent the rest of the afternoon following up on statements, with Tim fielding yet another call from the precinct, this time about some records they needed returned apparently. The end of the workday at five came and went, and soon enough, it was 5:53 p.m. and time to head up to the third floor where the party was starting at six in the lounge area in front of the research library. It was usually Tim’s M.O. to show up fashionably late, but there wasn’t anything else to do anyways, plus Sasha had a thing about being late to events, even casual office parties. 

Tim ducked his head into Jon’s office as Sasha and Martin headed towards the stairs, “You coming boss?”

“Oh, hello Tim. Probably not, or at least not now. These statements, you know,” he trailed off.

“Yeah, yeah, lot’s to catch up on and whatnot. Well, hopefully we’ll see you there later? You deserve a break, you know.”

“Thank you, and yes, maybe later. You and the others go ahead first.”

“Alright then,” with that, Tim turned and half jogged up the stairs to catch up to the other two, nearly running into Martin who was lingering behind the corner at the top of the stairs, while Sasha was a few dozen paces ahead of him. “Woah, Martin! Didn’t see you there.”

“Is he coming?” he asked, voice hopeful.

“Not now, he says maybe later, something about catching up on statements. Typical workaholic stuff, you know how he is.”

“Yeah,” the disappointment in his voice made Tim very keen on cheering him up.

“Don’t worry about him though, it can be an archival assistants night! We’ll have fun, I promise.”

It was nearly five past six by the time they made it to the lounge, on account of the institute having what Tim believed must be the slowest damn lifts in London. According to Rosie, the whole building was renovated as recently as the 90s, but clearly whoever was in charge of that thought the money would be better spent on faux-marble tiling than fixing the ancient lifts. There were already fifteen or so people there, but surely at least five of them were the ones from the operations department that planned it in the first place. 

“What do you guys want?” asked Tim as he made a beeline for the drinks.

“I’ll have a vodka cranberry, thanks Tim!” Sasha replied, eyes flitting around the room to see which one of the collapsible circular pub tables was empty.

“White—” Martin nudged Sasha with his elbow and pointed to an empty table in the corner of the room, “White wine if they have it. You can pick for me if they don’t, thanks.” He and Sasha made their way to the table, arranging themselves around it such that the empty spot faced towards the drinks table where Tim was.

The makeshift bar didn’t have an actual bartender, just Jasper from operations pouring drinks for people. He nodded in greeting at Tim as he approached.

“Hi,” Tim hit him with a dazzling smile simply because he was Tim, “A vodka cranberry, white wine, and a beer, please.”

Tim didn’t miss the way Jasper fumbled with the bottle of Smirnoff for a second before replying, “Coming right up.” He started with the vodka cranberry with no measuring device but his eyes. Tim spent the minute waiting observing the room and finding absolutely nothing of note. By now, there were probably twenty-five people in the room excluding himself, Martin, and Sasha, but this was neither enough people nor was it late enough for anything interesting to be happening. “Here you go,” Jasper the bootleg bartender said as he set the drinks in front of him.

“Thanks,” he grabbed his own and Martin’s drink in one hand and Sasha’s in the other, and left with a wink and another smile, for good measure. He returned to find Martin mid-rant with Sasha listening intently.

“—know how we had called in ahead? To say we were from the Magnus Institute and would be coming in to ask some questions and the receptionist was—thanks,” he picked up the cup from where Tim had set it on the table and took a sip before continuing, “—so the receptionist was like ‘I can’t promise the Head of Communications will be able to give you any information, but she or one of her assistants will be able to meet with you as soon as you’re here,’ right? So I got there and went to the head desk and told them I was from the institute and had called in, but the receptionist wasn’t the same one who answered my call, so they didn’t know what I was talking about and it was a whole thing. I kept getting directed to different floors and departments who kept directing me to other ones with a lot of waiting in between. And like I can’t blame them because they were clearly busy and understaffed, but God, you’d think—,” He interrupted himself and took another sip, “Like I’ve dealt with being in and out of hospitals enough that you’d think I’d be used to it, but every time I just can’t help but think that like a hospital would be the last place you want to be understaffed, right? So, anyways, I finally got a hold of someone from the communications department, but he wasn’t the head, so during the whole thing, he kept calling his boss to check on what information he could give me, and by the end of it, I got nothing pretty much, so, ultimately useless.”

Tim and Sasha offered up their sympathies before they moved on to distinctly less work related conversation. Most importantly, Tim had just adopted a golden retriever puppy from a shelter in a nearby suburb and spent a good ten minutes showing them photos. “His name’s Ollie. He’s six months old, and one of my friends from Trinity adopted his sibling from the same litter, so hopefully we can arrange some playdates for them on the weekends,” he told them, all while scrolling through nearly a hundred photos of Ollie. Throughout it all, and now that he thought back to it, throughout the whole night thus far, Martin paid attention and oohed and aahed at right moments, but part of his mind was elsewhere, and he kept looking at the door. It wasn’t until after the fourth time Tim noticed that he decided to call him on it, “Waiting for something, Martin?”

“Oh!” He flustered, directed his gaze back to his drink in front of him, “No sorry, it’s nothing.”

“You sure?” Tim asked, half teasing and fully not convinced.

“Yeah! It’s nothing.”

“Okay, if you say so,” he dropped it, but that didn’t mean he stopped wondering. Though an hour later, he no longer had to wonder as Jon appeared at the entrance of the lounge and Martin reacted instantly.

“Jon!” he exclaimed, a bit louder than Tim reckoned he meant to, wine-tipsy. He waved Jon over to table with enthusiasm. Jon gave him a tight smile and nodded, pointing to the drinks table first. Tim watched as Martin’s eyes followed Jon there. He said something to Jasper, who began mixing things in a clear plastic cup while Jon stood awkwardly and looked around the room but desperately tried to avoid eye contact with anyone at the same time. Jasper tapped him on the shoulder, and he startled, whirling around. He took the drink with an apologetic smile and raised it in a gesture of thanks before turning back around and heading to the table. 

“Glad you could make it Jon, what are you drinking?” Sasha greeted him.

“Oh just a rum and coke.”

“Finally decided to take a break from those statements, huh?” Tim clapped a hand on his shoulder.

“Yes, I suppose I did.” The four of them continued chatting, first just some small talk, but Jon finally seemed to get more comfortable twenty minutes in, and they could move on to things more entertaining than the weather and the lateness of the tube. Again, most importantly, Tim told him about Ollie and showed him the requisite photos. 

Somehow, they got to a point where Jon was giving what could only be accurately described as a lecture on how the liver processes alcohol. This included a case study on a patient at St. Thomas’ Hospital in the early 2000s who had auto-brewery syndrome, which Jon said was “a condition where gut bacteria or fungi ferments the carbohydrates from the food you eat, producing ethanol alcohol in the process,” which Tim found interesting enough, but he wasn’t ashamed to admit that after the first four minutes of this, he mostly lost focus and was just nodding whenever Jon paused for a bit. Martin, however, looked thoroughly enraptured through the whole of it, asking what seemed to be all the right questions about the biochemical pathways of alcohol metabolism and giggling at the absurdity of auto-brewery. By seven minutes in, he had his elbows on the table and chin resting in his hands, gazing at Jon with single-minded focus as he hung on each sentence as if “alcohol dehydrogenase” and “acetyl-CoA” were the most fascinating words in the English language. In the moment, brain slightly fuzzy with alcohol (ironically), Tim had mostly chalked it up to Martin being a bit of a nerd. 

***

But now, he knows better and knows that there was perhaps a bit more to it. 

“Tim? You done being shocked?” Martin snaps him out of his reverie.

“Yeah, sorry, just thinking.”

“About how dumb all of this is? You can be honest, Jon doesn’t just not like me, he actively dislikes me. This is ridiculous, I know.”

“Martin,” Sasha puts a comforting hand on his shoulder, “I don’t think he actually dislikes you. He just gets prickly sometimes. And plus, if he can’t learn to appreciate you, that’s honestly his problem.”

Tim chimes back in with, “Yeah! His loss, Martin.”

“Mm, I don’t know, but thanks guys.”

They fall back into easy conversation and laughter within a few minutes, as the nervous flush on Martin’s face subsides. And if that night, Tim makes it a personal goal to somehow get Jon to appreciate Martin as he deserves, well, then that’s nobody’s business but his own.

#rarely am i inspired to write fluff lmk how i did #the magnus archives #tma #jonmartin #jonathan sims #martin blackwood #tim stoker #sasha james #jonmartin fic #tma fic #my fic #mine

[sunny-hopewell]

#1 - the empty society

posted by sunny hopewell on sept. 12th, 20XX

DISCLAIMER: Please note that, just by reading this, you may succumb to the very phenomenon described here. My hope is that the next people or intelligent life who read this are either themselves resilient to it, or that enough time has passed that the sheer weight of this knowledge no longer causes such a heavy impact on the reader.

This is an attempt to record the phenomenon, once referred to colloquially as “ghosting,” that has resulted in a mass decrease in the Earth’s human population. More specifically, the latest estimate (prior to the disappearance of professionals who had counted) was that only 0.002% of human life remains. The majority of this phenomenon was said to occur within the last two years.

It began on a small scale. People across the world would report sudden disappearances of their friends, loved ones, and coworkers. As an odd aspect of this phenomenon, if these people who disappeared had jobs or projects that occupied the majority of their time, their workload would somehow still show up completed— right where it needed to be, and often times completed perfectly.

Early news coverage described this “ghosting” phenomenon as a global pandemic that dwarfed the prior pandemic, COVID-19. However, it was not long before coverage was reduced to a single global news outlet. This was in direct response to the fact that this phenomenon somehow spread not by contact, but by deep awareness of the phenomenon itself. So, if the news was widely spread in a panic, it would lead to an increase of “ghostings” all across the globe.

Further attempts were made to study and contain this phenomenon, but not only did researchers seem to succumb to it rather quickly, corporate entities valued the free, flawless labor of “ghosts” over the lives and families of their own employees. There were reports, at the peak of this phenomenon’s impact, of such organizations locking their employees in rooms, forcing them to listen to readings of these articles on repeat until they vanished right where they stood. Often this process was recorded to take less than half an hour to empty a room of hundreds. As this inevitably escalated into mass disappearances, attempts were made by remaining global leadership to, immediately, cease all discussion of the “ghosting” phenomenon in order to contain its spread. Soon, though, even those in leadership would vanish some way or another, and those who remained were left to decide for themselves how to handle this unique situation.

I understand that posting this on the internet during this is, in and of itself, a major risk to any non-ghost readers, hence the warning at the beginning of this blog post. For the record, I have (and will continue) to save these records in various digital and print formats to distribute across the land to increase their chances of discovery later. Each one will contain multiple iterations of the warning above, but knowing human tendency towards curiosity, I know this phenomenon will be discovered at some point, even if it is in the very distant future. 

The internet itself, during this time, is its own kind of enigma. The user accounts of those “ghosted” individuals continue to show signs of frequent use (often in accordance with their pre-ghost usage). However, their patterns of language and communication are no longer discernible to any non-ghost. In the beginning, it appeared to professionals that these accounts made procedurally-generated statuses, post, and messages. Eventually, as the web became inundated with these ghost-users, they seemed to learn vocabulary from one another. Now, all ghost-generated activity on the web is virtually unfathomable word-vomit. Not only does pondering this material fill any aware survivor with a despair— which seems to be the deadly variable that ultimately results in being ghosted— it also makes finding any non-ghost users on the web incredibly difficult to locate. Search engines and social media no longer function efficiently in doing so.

Websites and social media platforms themselves, at first, began releasing “updates” to their infrastructure that no longer made any rational sense. Soon, much to my own personal fascination, I would discover the emergence of new platforms that, because they make no rational sense, are unusable to non-ghosts. The internet now, as it stands, is nearly obsolete. I’m not confident that this internet-copy of this blog post will even remain readable or accessible for very long. Furthermore, this phenomenon appears to be beginning in the mail and package-delivery systems, respectively— mail will arrive and pile up at households with notices that make no sense. Fortunately, any packages that arrive with unreadable labels just appear to be random goods you might see in online shopping, so sometimes these are a delightful surprise in the midst of this hellish seen.

I’m going to backtrack, as I haven’t really described the ghosting phenomenon’s labor aspects in-depth. The cities, towns, and homes are virtually perfect, now. Lawns are mowed, any wear-and-tear is replaced or repaired overnight. No sign remains of large scale riots from when corporate ghost-makers were being chased out of town— everything looks and functions just as it did pre-phenomenon. Just today, I walked into a local fast food franchise and purchased my food at an empty counter. I can’t quite describe what the process looks like— it’s almost like paying attention to any direct observation of this ghost-labor is impossible. Sometimes, I have no memory between stepping into the store and stepping out with whatever I purchased.

I still work my usual clerical job, but I do it remotely using my laptop. Every other Friday, the same direct deposit ends up in my bank account. I suppose that I could probably just stop working and still receive this pay, but the routine itself helps me keep track of time and feel as though I am somehow still contributing to society.

So, now to answer your burning question: why is some rando online able to discuss this phenomenon so in-depth without, themself, ghosting? I can’t be certain, but my strong hypothesis is that giving into despair or apathy towards humanity is ultimately what causes someone to “ghost.” I’ve come to this conclusion by encountering a few survivors— less than 20 in the city which I now reside— who all share a thread of hope for the future. My pseudonym on these blog posts is meant to promote a sense of hope for a better future— a sort of boost to a reader’s morale before I impart what may be some kind of distressful accounts. 

The next question I imagine some folks may have is, what gives sunny hopewell hope? Honestly, simply the idea of recording these last bits of humanity’s final times for the future invigorates me to keep going. I am sure that, once I am unable to interview any more individuals in this way, I will succumb to the phenomenon as well. I like to think I’ve made peace with that, but how can one be so sure anymore? Still, I let this hope to document humanity’s last days fuel me as long as there is still any left to document. 

If it hasn’t become clear by this point, this will not be the only blog post. I have already collected a couple of interviews with survivors in this city already, and I am continuing to search the city for any others willing to speak with me. 

If anyone is out there reading this now, and you think you can handle listening to these stories, please stick around. And, even if not— please spread any hope you have for the future to those you may encounter. It may be just what saves us all.

‘Til next time,

 - sunny hopewell 

-----

tags: #ghosting #hope #humanity #nonfiction

#ghosting #hope #humanity #nonfiction #horror #loneliness #sunny-hopewell #the empty society

[yfere]

Shipping Calculus! Live Updates from C2E70

……………Hello. Today in shipping calculus we explore that most basic and heinous of arithmetic—subtraction. Minus one party member, the landscape looks a little different, a little darker. But there are still good things to be found. Thank you to @drinkingdeadpeopletea, @hla-rosa, and @alarnia for helping with data entry. Masterpost here

+12 to Sam/The Slide Whistle which should absolutely become a staple of Critical Role sound effects, I’m begging you here

+19 to Jester/Yasha These two get all the Angst Points, with Jester having a breakdown over Yasha’s betrayal, lovingly drawing her eyes and demonstrating she knows them well enough to be able to pinpoint the little differences in them now. Going to Yasha’s room, and the Romantic Gift of the mural of flowers, and telling Yasha in a Romantic Monologue that she still believes in her, that the Stormlord should be there for her, and that she’s going to be brought back to become the person Jester knows she wants to be. Asking the Traveler about his relationship with the Stormlord and trying to figure out through him if Yasha is safe or can be saved.

+15 to Beau/Yasha Beau meanwhile listens, and listens, and listens for the sound of thunder, an indication that the Stormlord is still out there watching over Yasha…but she doesn’t get anything. Insisting that the group distinguish between Yasha and whatever person left them and betrayed them, because she’s sure they aren’t the same person. Lying casually to everyone she meets about how Yasha’s just taking some personal time off, no need to worry.

-12 to The Mighty Nein/Whisper Campaigns as Jester’s mission gets derailed by her unsuccessful attempt to shoot some ballistae, while Fjord finds himself needing to surrender in the face of Absolute Incompetence.

+38 to Beau/Jester But these two are the stars of this weeks’ shipping calculus, inseparable from start to finish and each others’ proven closest confidant. Beau comforting Jester as she breaks down over Yasha, hugging her close and despite her own reluctance to be vulnerable, confessing to Jester how much this has hurt her as well, how she hasn’t been able to sleep properly and how she hopes for Yasha to be saved!! Beau telling Jester she’s amazing and doesn’t need anyone’s validation! Telling Jester her voice is wonderful and imitating it—flattery! Love! Jester complimenting Beau’s fists! Their awkward flirting reaching such levels of Sickening that they end up talking about the weather! “The wind is very windy today” gods you two are disasters. Then--then!! Composing messages to Dairon together, sneaking off upstairs together and complaining about the lack of privacy in the house like every teenaged couple failing to get away with boning in the family house. And—I mean they are sleeping together, though tragically they split up for the night to better catch Dairon when she arrives, because they are a Team.

-20 to Dairon/Detective Work. Beau is understandably incredulous that after all this time Dairon knows….nothing about what the M9 have been doing, until Jester gives the Xhorhaus tip—which is funny because it’s not like they’ve been at all subtle in any of their activities in this country. Then there’s the peculiar beauty of Dairon stealthing expertly to the balcony whilst completely missing how the protege she’s looking for is VERY CLEARLY AND OBVIOUSLY SLEEPING ON THE FRONT STOOP RIGHT BELOW GODS DAIRON YOU ARE AMAZING AT MISSING THE THINGS RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR NOSE

+12 to Nott/Religion as Caduceus confirms that the liquor cabinet downstairs was always meant to be her personal shrine, and Nott reveals she can hear god talking to her.

-16 to Jester/Religion as we learn that Jester has zero knowledge of any gods besides the ones the party themselves worship and have told her about. Raven Queen who? Knowing Mistress? Don’t know her.

+18 to the Traveler/Orgies as he’s apparently been “busy” with his other followers, and how his initial idea to gather in a relaxing subtropical retreat is an excellent place to get even busier. Alas, Jester still has him wrapped around her little finger and successfully advocates for a volcano, which probably still has some sexual energy, if The Incredibles can be believed.

+4 to Jester/Fjord—they don’t interact directly much, but Fjord as always asks if Jester is doing okay, and complains about her spell slots on her behalf. Jester as always talks up Fjord’s skills with talking to people and using accents above all else. Fjord also asks what matters to Jester when she snaps about not caring which side they end up taking, but some points are taken away as he immediately pivots to advocating for his own preferences instead of listening to the answer.

+0 to Caleb/Cat-Shaped Creatures as Frumpkin works overtime as the party’s collective comfort object, almost to the exclusion of Caleb petting the poor thing himself. And then there are the moorbounders, which were straight up ditched. We knew it would happen eventually but—they had names! A history! Do we really need to lose more members of this party?

+6 to Caleb/Fjord Alas, the tragedy of these two asking each other if they’re feeling okay and entirely sidestepping each other’s concern! This is Not How You Earn Points! Fjord instantly leaping to Caleb/the group’s defense the second the wizard gets the side-eye in Bazzoxan. Caleb being willing to compromise about listening to the Bright Queen for Fjord and letting loose a host of compliments about his disguise and accent skills, then once Fjord is safely gone going on and on to Beau about how she and Fjord hold the group together, and how they really need to make sure Fjord is okay, goodness look at this worrywart.

+6 to Caleb/Jester …and the Worrywart also continues to stress over Marion Lavorre, and tries to reassure her that there’s nothing definitive the know or could have known about Yasha. Meanwhile, Jester gets concerned over Caleb’s distress and ditching the group after their run-in with the Scourger. Jester also compliments Caleb’s Teleportation Circle, and offers him a pocketful of crystals she picked up, which he could have been more appreciative of.

+14 to Jester/The Bright Queen and Nott/Heteronormativity as Jester once more obsesses over what the Bright Queen is wearing and how “ravishing” her eyes are. Meanwhile Nott tries desperately to make sure the compliments are coming from A Man, because Women Like Compliments From Men and Not As Much From Women Apparently, and picking a spectacularly terrible target in Caduceus Clay who really does not notice or care what the Bright Queen looks like, ever.

+4 to Jester/Caduceus While Nott may have been wrong to describe Caduceus as “dark,” both Jester and Fjord are very quick to express their appreciation for the pink pastel aesthetic. Jester gets comforting pats from Caduceus, they compliment each other on being impressive, Jester gets very briefly excited over the sword being for Caduceus before she’s shot down, and preens over the Traveler alcove Caduceus made for her in the garden

+9 to Caduceus/Channeling His Inner Demon as his eyes flash black in true Supernatural style to ward off a person who was probably just trying to sleep in the only inn in town, the poor bastard.

+5 to Fjord/Caduceus With an additional point for the sheer delight of how confused Fjord continues to be over Caduceus’ existence, feat “YOU’VE NEVER BEEN THERE?” incredulity, and how Caduceus is an absolute shit about giving Fjord a birdbath to worship in, just deep enough so he can drown himself if he’s in the mood. Which apparently Fjord kind of is. That’s romance. Fjord following Caduceus upstairs, For What Purpose We Can Only Guess

+7 to Caleb/Caduceus as they continue to be on the exact same page when it comes to how to address the Bright Queen and what their responsibilities are in warning others. Caleb buffing Caduceus with Fortune’s Favor! Caduceus continuing to latch onto interesting little phrases, notably one with “cocked” in it, and seeming concerned over the length of time Caleb was off on his own after the Scourger interrogation. An interrogation Caduceus offered to help with with spellwork to make the Scourger tell the truth! Caleb calling Caduceus downstairs to hang out (in an attempt to help Beau/Jester along, seems like) but only in fact managing to convince Nott that he wants, and I quote, “boy time.” Caduceus ribbing Caleb about being very Not Calm as he’s drinking to calm his nerves, that’s nice.

+8 to Fjord/That One Ogre who called him a “little fuzzball” and seemed worried about how tired he was and did his absolute best to spread just the message that Fjord gave him in his bugbear courier form. I mean, I’ve shipped for less.

+20 to Nott/Yeza as they have an adorable reunion, complete with such romance staples as Dropping What You’re Holding, Embraces, and Enjoying Your Partner’s Terrible Cooking! Nott defending Yeza’s dangerousness and ability to be a flight risk to Fjord, who dared to call Yeza boring. Unfortunately, Nott’s love and concern for her husband also resulted in -13 to Yeza/Piracy, though to be fair Orly’s supposed to be doing legitimate mercantile work at this point so there may Still Be A Chance to put Yeza on a boat

+14 to Caleb/Essik as Essik jumps on the chance to ferry the party all over the globe. Caleb makes the mistake of asking the Bright Queen for dunamancy training from Essik rather than Essik himself, he who is Too Eager To Do Caleb Favors, but when Caleb shows back up in an anxiety-ridden fugue Essik does get the chance to take a break from his busy schedule to promise he’ll absolutely see what he can do for Caleb, no persuasion required. Point loss for Caleb’s awkward blabbing being physically painful to watch and for Essik just ditching him by the doors.

+5 to Matt/A Certain Kind Of Tension that is rising….and puckering….that necessitates some recovery….

#critical role #cr spoilers #shipping calculus #beauyasha #beaujester #lavorregard #fjorclay #clayleb #yester #jestasha #fjorester #widofjord #shadowgast #clayvorre #widojest

[ending-myworld]

do you ever feel like your life is a cycle of bad decision, make up for it... only to then make another bad decision?

my first post, and I’m afraid it’s not a light one. in my life, I find myself in a constant battle with my ability to rationalise good and bad decisions.

I’ve always been a person who is easily influenced. as a teenager and in my early 20′s. this developed to the point of taking drugs, smoking regularly, drinking, and generally other self-destructive behaviour. the issue is, I would always realise when I’d made a grave mistake, that it was a mistake (or a bad choice), and then attempt to make amends with the person or thing that was affected, only to make the same choice again...

that cycle has cost me dearly throughout the years, monetarily, relationships, friendships... everything. simultaneously, I’m almost attacking my own consciousness and broadly, my mental health. at the time of writing this, I can conclusively say that I have just lost the most important person in my life. the worst part is that undeservedly, as well as the guilt, I just plainly feel sorry for myself. I feel hopelessly stuck in this insane cycle, but more on that later.

the thing is, I’m not a stupid guy. my internal assessment of my decision making process is simple. I know what is right, and what is wrong. I know what I want, and what I do not want. but the mystery is that I still make decisions that have catastrophically negative impacts on the things that are ‘right, and that I ‘want’. It’s almost as if, in the moment, I don’t realise the severity or potential consequences of my actions and ultimately result in the loss of my access to such things.

this blog would be longer than the bible if I were to to disseminate all of the bad choices I’ve made in my life. to be honest, maybe a bit of god in my life would be helpful.

I would be lying if I said that I didn’t know quite how dearly these decisions would cost me, because I do. the confusing thing is, I understand the consequences of my actions every single time, and I still proceed as if it’s not a big deal, in the moment.

this assessment is true every time I go out with friends. “oh, it’s just one cigarette, it’s fine”. “just one more drink, it’s fine...”.

and in this case, on this crucially important day in my life, and just as things were going well in my relationship, I fucked up again. the last time I fucked up, it was Christmas, I smoked while out with friends, my partner HATES smoking, and understandably. that took a long time to fix. prior to that, it was to do with my habit for going out and coming home late. 

this was a regular occurrence and something which shares synchronicity with the crux of this post. fundamentally, in the moment, I just don’t think rationally about the cost of me making that choice. I habitually bury my head in the sand and deal with the consequences after. It’s pathetic behaviour, and to be honest, I am proud to say that part of me has been in the past for a number of months.

and life has been good. It has been so good. My partner and I have had fun in lockdown, being silly together and playing chess, just generally making the most of our time together. I have absolutely loved and cherished every single moment we’ve spent together - and I have shown that too.

then today, this morning. I was scrolling through my Facebook stories as I do sometimes, and I come across a story post from a girl called Myra. now, this is not someone I have ever met in my life, nor is it someone I would ever want to meet, or even engage in conversation with, and that’s the truth. this is just someone who I happened to come across while scrolling. 

something within me made me like... no, love heart her photo.

WHY? why? why would I do that. I could think of nothing worse than engaging in a conversation with any other woman apart from my girlfriend. I have genuinely been so happy in my life, and I made a choice to disrespect my partner for absolutely no rhyme or reason.

now, this is something I completely forgot about. about two hours later, my partner came upstairs telling me she felt poorly. out of interest, she took a pregnancy test. we’ve been trying for a baby for the past few months at this point. to my absolute surprise and delight, it came back positive.

to say I was excited would be an understatement. my thoughts immediately turned to making a plan financially, providing for the family by keeping my second job which I was originally going to stop, looking after her through this pregnancy. any thought of this random post I liked on Facebook was well out of my mind.

then, as I was on the phone to my Mum upstairs, my laptop open with Facebook messenger downstairs, she sees the message on my laptop and came upstairs to rightly confront me about it.

what is there to say? how do I compartmentalise or even rationalise that decision? I was filled with such anger and disappointment with myself. I know how big of a deal this is, but again, in the moment, I did not see it that way.

I found out today that the most important person in my whole world is pregnant with my child, and how did I respond? with huge slap of disrespect. as I type this, I’m at home with our puppy, she’s at her Mum’s, making the decision to leave me.

my words mean nothing anymore. I have cried, and lied, and begged her to stay with me when I’ve fucked up in the past. but then I do the same thing again. I am finding it so hard to understand myself, because the one true thing in my life is the genuine love I have for this girl, she’s everything to me

so what now?

am I even allowed to feel the way I feel? do I deserve to feel utter disappointment and sadness, to the point of taking my own life? that’s a selfish thought process, but it’s genuinely how I feel. I feel entangled in a maze of bad decisions that have had no outcome but to lead me down a path of unhappiness and loneliness, and honestly, I deserve to feel this way. I have brought nothing but sadness to a truly wholesome and exciting day. this should have been the most exciting day of our lives together - to be remembered forever

and now?

I can’t even share this day with the person that means the most to me in the whole wide world, and it’s all my fault.

and why am I here? that’s another important question. well, quite frankly, I have nowhere else to turn, no one else to communicate this with. this is an endless cycle of behaviour that I am not able to fix.

this evening, I was actually able to make a decision I can be sure of. I joined a well known clinic that supports assisted suicide. I feel comfortable and calm in my decision to end my own life. and paying the fee gave me a huge sense of relief. I finally feel like I have control in my decision making.

no one in my life has benefited from their social or personal interaction with me, and I am not comfortable with having a war with myself for the rest of my life so,

look, this post is candid, and as honest as it can be. right now, I have made peace with this decision, which has not been made out of selfishness, rather my desire to be at peace with myself, but also for other people to be at peace with me, and the awful decisions I have made in my life.

I am open to questions or comments. I am aware that this post, based on the fact that the day started with my own bad decision, may come across as attention seeking - I can assure you it is not. but it is helpful to have a platform where I can anonymously share my journey, and provide regular updates on my condition, and ultimately I intend to share my last post on my last day.

this is a sure thing, so anyone who wants to join my journey is welcome to do so, I will share details of my meetings with doctors.

I’d like to close by admitting full responsibility for the decisions I made that led me to this point in my life. I, and I alone, chose this. I chose this all along, I just didn’t realise it.

#bad choices #bad decisions #suicide

[mintymiknow]

Heartbeat [Minho/Lee Know]

This drabble is part of the 50 Kisses Drabble Challenge! [Requested: Number 27 + Minho]

Number 27: Kisses exchanged while one person sits on the other’s lap

A/N: I told y’all that I’d be writing Doctor Minho. So yes, have some Doctor Minho because that fansign got me real good. I may have died for a minute. I am the biggest Doctor Minho enthusiast fite me

Aside from the whirring, airy sound coming from the air conditioner, the room was fairly quiet. The black coffee that remained untouched in a dark blue mug was a nice contrast to the bright white walls, and its aroma would at least keep Minho awake. The doctor was reading a few papers – updates and reports from his patients – when a sudden knock was heard on his door. “Come in.” he says.

His receptionist peeks through the door and says, “Dr. Lee, your next patient is here to see you.”

Minho looks at the wall clock – 9:00 PM – and then tilts his head in response. “I don’t recall having any patients until 10:00. Is this a walk-in appointment?” he asks, swinging rather childishly in his chair.

“No, Dr. Lee.” the receptionist laughs, “But…I’d say it’s a special appointment.”

“Ah.” Minho chuckles to himself, finally catching on. Only a certain someone had “special appointments”. He nods, “Let her in.”

The receptionist politely bows before closing the door. Minho can hear muffled instructions on the other side, and not a minute later, you walk into the room, a bright smile plastered on your face. You shut the door – and even lock it – before walking over to the doctor. 

Minho raises an eyebrow at you, a dangerous smirk dancing along his lips, “What seems to be the problem with this patient?”

“I’m not sure.” you shrug, “I was hoping you could find out.”

Minho lets out a breathy laugh before standing up from his chair. He wastes no time in pulling you into his arms, chin resting on top of your head. A soft giggle escapes your lips when Minho starts kissing your forehead repeatedly. “There was this really rude customer at the café this afternoon. He didn’t like the coffee and poured it all on the floor for Jeongin to clean up.” you shake your head while recalling this afternoon’s mishaps at the café you owned, “Thankfully, Woojin helped me handle the jerk.”

Minho hummed a quiet “hmm” before pulling away to look at your face, “Did Woojin beat him up? Please tell me Woojin beat him up.”

“Min, that doesn’t sound too good. What if the guy gets really injured? We’d get reported for violence.” you chuckle.

“Then he can come to my clinic. I’ll give him a beating…and then patch him up.” the doctor wiggles his eyebrows.

You slap his chest while laughing, “Ok, enough of that.” You playfully trace the dark circles under his eyes and gently smile, “How’s my doctor? He looks really tired.”

Minho sighs, and you can tell that it’s been hard. Of course, that kind of came with being a doctor, but you still worried over Minho’s well-being and health. “You know how it is.” Minho chuckles, “But today, there was this little girl who was afraid of getting confined, so I told her to think happy thoughts. She said ‘then should I think about my cats?’ and I think I just melted. I didn’t specialize in pediatrics ‘cause kids are...eh, but that one was an angel.”

“Well, that does sound like something you’d say.” you grin, “And kids aren’t that bad. You just need to get used to them.”

Minho playfully sticks his tongue out, causing you to giggle. You softly run your fingers through his hair, “Do you still have appointments?”

He nods, “My next one’s at 10:00.”

You glance at the clock and notice that it was already 9:20. With a small pout, you poke Minho’s nose, “I take it I won’t be seeing you tonight?”

Minho’s smile is sad and apologetic as he replies, “I’ll be home, y/n. My shift’s ends at 11:30.” He grasps your hands in his, gently giving it a squeeze, “Do you think you can wait for me? I miss cuddling you to sleep.”

You love the way his eyes sparkle when they look at you as if you were his whole universe. “Ok, I’ll be waiting.” you say quietly, squeezing his hands in the same manner he did.

You thought that was it; you’d leave the office, and Minho would prepare for his next appointment. However, something in you urges you to do otherwise. Instead of saying good night and leaving, you take hold of his black tie and pull him towards you. “Before I go…” you whisper.

That’s the last thing Minho hears you say because the next second, your lips are on his. Minho doesn’t think twice in reciprocating the action, tugging you forward and pulling you onto his lap as he falls back onto his chair. The gesture causes shivers to course through your entire body like an electric shock. The kiss grows deeper every passing second as if you were trying to outrun the time. Your arms snake around Minho’s neck as his circle around your waist, both of you pulling each other impossibly close.

Perhaps it was because he was a doctor – or maybe it was just because he was already used to this – but Minho knew exactly how to make every kiss magical and addicting. He knew how to perfectly move his lips – the perfect pace, pressure, and angle. He knew where to touch you – the way his fingers brushed along your neck and jaw, or the way his thumb caressed your cheek, or the way his hands expertly roamed your body. Every single thing he did was perfect and precise.

After what seemed to be forever, you both pull away, failing to conceal the grins that were spreading across your faces. Minho leans his forehead against yours, placing a tender kiss on your nose. “Did you know that your heart’s beating really fast? Or that your body temperature has risen? Or that your hormones are probably going crazy? Are you that whipped for me?”

“Show-off.” you laugh, “You’re probably going through all that as well. I don’t need to be a doctor to figure that out.”

He chuckles at your words, “I promise I’ll see you later, y/n.”

“Mhmm.” you nod, a small smile on your reddened lips, “Take care, ok?”

Minho offers you a soft smile before letting you off his lap, giving you one more good night kiss. You head for the door, but before you can open it, Minho jokes, “Don’t go cuddling Soonie, Doongie or Dori. I’m the one you’re cuddling tonight.”

“Yes, Dr. Lee.” you smirk, hushing your voice as you say, “And you might want to fix the collar of your coat.”

You point at his doctor’s coat, the collar visibly upturned as a result of wandering hands. Minho chuckles, an equally devilish smirk coiling at his lips, “What a naughty patient.”

“Shut up, Minho.” you laugh before closing the door shut.

Minho sits there, an amused grin on his face as he adjusted his coat’s collar. Yes, his heartbeat was also on a rampage.

#stray kids #minho #lee know #lee know scenario #minho scenario #lee know imagine #minho imagine #lee know drabble #minho drabble #lee minho #stray kids scenario #stray kids imagine #stray kids drabble #skz #imagine #scenario #drabble #lee know x reader #minho x reader #stray kids x reader #minho doctor au #minho doctor #doctor au #doctor #au #medical au #50 kisses drabble challenge

[elceeu2morrow]

NEW DIRECTION Louis Tomlinson on why he’s not ready to make up with Zayn Malik and how fatherhood made him grow-up fast

Beth Neil  2 Feb 2020, 0:01  Updated: 2 Feb 2020, 3:06

Back then he didn’t appear to be a natural frontman. He wasn’t one to hog the spotlight, nor did he seem remotely interested in competing with the magnetism of Harry or the vocal range of Zayn.

“There were times I struggled to find my place in the band,” Louis admits today.

But it’s often the quiet ones you’ve got to look out for.

Behind the scenes he was very much centre stage: Louis was the mouthpiece, constantly fighting the boys’ corner and acting as chief negotiator between band and management.

“Being from Doncaster,” he says, “I’ve never had a problem with telling anyone ‘no’.”

On top of this (and perhaps most significantly), in the six years that the band were together after finishing third on The X Factor in 2010, Louis diligently racked up more songwriting credits than any of the others, hinting that a hard-working and ambitious young artist lurked beneath the surface.

Indeed, while he might be the last of the band to release a solo album (four years after they announced their hiatus, breaking several million hearts in the process), the result suggests that Louis, having held his nerve and bided his time, might just prove to be the dark horse.

“There was a while when I was worried I was getting left behind – some of the boys are on to their second album now,” he says, taking a draw onthe first of several cigarettes. “At times, I’ve been swimming against the tide, working out who I am. I was trying to find a way back into the industry, thinking of it mathematically rather than going off feeling and emotion.”

He’s referring to collaborations with Bebe Rexha and Steve Aoki in 2016 and 2017 respectively, which, although successful, weren’t where his heart lay. With Kill My Mind – the exhilarating ’90s-inspired opening track of the album Walls – he sets his stall out with a clear departure from anything he’s done before.

Walls is about regret, reflection and ultimately, hope, and feels like Louis, who sings in his still-broad Doncaster accent, has finally found his voice.

“I’ve always wanted to be autobiographical and honest. And in the last six months the songs I’ve written and recorded are of a better standard because there’s an honesty there,” he says.

Honesty certainly characterises the album, sometimes devastatingly so. There’s no escaping the fact that Louis, 28, has faced unimaginable pain over the last few years.

First losing his mum Johannah Deakin, known as Jay, in December 2016 to leukaemia, and then his sister Félicité, who died last year aged 18 following an accidental drug overdose.

The lyrics to Two Of Us, written about his mum, include intimate details about Louis’ experience with grief.

“It wasn’t until after I’d written it that I realised how much vulnerability I’d put in there,” he says. “When I first performed it… I had fans coming up to me in tears telling me their stories, and that’s not something I’ve ever had before. And to do it on that level about something so delicate… It was really cool to take something so dark and make people feel like that.

“I had to get a song like that off my chest. It was difficult writing about things that felt trivial compared to what was going on in my life. There was, I think, a necessity to write that song before I could move on creatively.”

Understandably, Louis won’t talk specifically about Félicité. But when asked about how grief has shaped him both as a man and an artist, he pays tribute to Jay.

“I think it’s a credit to how my mum brought me up that I have a resilience,” he says. “There’s nothing I want less than to have people feel sorry for me, so having that mentality has helped me through the hardest of times.

"I’ve also felt a real support system through my fans. I’d always felt it on a lower level, but when it’s something so impactful and life-defining, I really did feel it from them.”

Days after Jay’s death, Louis appeared live on The X Factor to perform Just Hold On with Aoki.

He was clearly in pieces and it was hard enough just watching, but somehow he held it together, presumably thanks again to that resilience.

“Sometimes it’s fight or flight,” Louis explains. “And the way I was brought up and because of where I’m from, I only see one option in that situation. I also wanted to put myself second and do it for my mum.

"That moment was bigger than me and it was actually incredibly liberating. It used every bit of strength and power and I look back on that performance as one of the proudest moments of my career.”

He says he tends not to suppress emotion and is able to share his darkest points with those he’s closest to.

But as the eldest of Jay’s seven children (five girls and two boys), he also feels a huge weight of responsibility towards his younger siblings and hasn’t had any professional therapy himself.

“No, no, nothing like that. That might be down to a bit of Northern pride, but I have a lot of responsibility on my shoulders and that drives me. I’ve got siblings who look up to me and I’ve got my grandparents as well. So all those things keep my head screwed on.

“My mum had a massive influence on me and I lived with a lot of sisters in the house, so I do find it easier to speak about my emotions. But I’m also from Doncaster, where to be a guy is to be tough and traditional and I feel like [there are] times where pride kicks in and I just say I’m all right.

"I’m lucky that I’ve got good people around me who I can trust and who I can be completely vulnerable with and say how I feel. Nine times out of 10, I don’t bottle things up. I wear my heart on my sleeve.”

[below the cut is the rest of the unedited article - including Eleanor, Freddie, 1D]

His model, blogger and politics graduate girlfriend Eleanor Calder, 27, who Louis first got together with back in 2010 during the last week of The X Factor (“before it got manic”) has been a crucial part of the stability he’s needed through such sadness.

“She’s been amazing. With any monumental time in your life you need people who understand and love you. She makes my life easier.”

In 2015 they split up for nearly two years during which time Louis became a dad to Freddie, now four, following a brief fling with LA stylist Briana Jungwirth.

The track Too Young is almost an apology to Eleanor for that period (“I’m sorry I hurt you, darling… I cut you off cos I didn’t know no better”), but Louis says the time apart taught him some tough lessons and has made them stronger.

“I think we both agree that we needed [that break]. I was too immature for a relationship of that seriousness. But I had to learn that and be an idiot first.

“A lot of young men won’t understand until they have hindsight. The responsibility of meeting someone you could spend the rest of your life with at 18 is too much for most immature men. I was very immature at that → age and didn’t understand the feelings or importance.”

He and Eleanor guard their privacy ferociously and very deliberately haven’t made themselves a public couple. They don’t go to places where they’ll get papped or post pictures of each other on social media.

“Me and Eleanor have been together ages and I don’t have a lot of private photos for myself,” he says. “Even on a night out there’ll be some f**ker taking my picture and it goes everywhere.

"So those moments to ourselves are special. It’s the same way I look at Freddie. Do I wanna show him off and tell the world how amazing he is? Yes, of course I do! But I know he’s amazing and he knows that and that’s what matters.”

He dotes on Freddie (“I cherish my time with my boy”) but admits the unplanned pregnancy was a wake-up call.

“Yeah, it was unexpected and I had to grow up very quickly. It was another one of them moments – being faced with the reality of a situation and having to step up. It was a very maturing time in my life.

“And, again, I’ve kind of got between two headspaces. I’m the responsible dad and brother some days and other days I’m still the reckless idiot chav I used to be. I’m still trying to work out a happy medium.”

Absolutely no one could have predicted the global phenomenon that 1D became, least of all Louis, Liam, Zayn, Niall and Harry themselves.

They sold 20 million albums worldwide, earning over £40million each, but the pressures of fame were, at times, intolerable. Louis says they were only able to keep their heads screwed on because they had each other.

“You can never be prepared for that. It was such a head f**k. But we grounded each other so the minute one of us acted like a d**khead one of the others would say: ‘Stop being a d**khead’. I see people in this job surrounding themselves with superiority and they lose the concept of the real world.”

He remembers doing a shoot with the band for Pepsi over in the States with American footballer Drew Brees.

“This guy was like a god and we were insignificant when he was around, which we understood. But I’ve never seen anything like it. Every sentence that came out of his mouth he’d have an audience of hangers-on in hysterics.

"These people were so far up his arse and he didn’t have one good joke. He had no banter! I still hang around with my boys from Doncaster and I hear real stories all the time, which helps me understand the world that unfortunately I don’t get to see. Having empathy with people and a connection with the world is imperative for any songwriter.”

Harry Styles recently said that he never touched drugs during his time in the band (although he’s made up for that since), because he didn’t want to “mess it up”. Louis smiles as he confides that he can’t say the same.

“All I’ll say is that I did my fair share and enjoyed my time in the band. It’s right what Harry said and it was smart of him, but I definitely had a lot of fun in the band. I was always aware of how amazing the opportunity was, but also enjoying the moment for what it was. I lived like anyone else my age – the difference was that I was in One Direction.”

He’s in touch with Harry, Niall and Liam “sporadically” (we’ll come to Zayn shortly), but they’re all on very different paths for now.

“If we all went to a pub tomorrow it’d be like we’d never left. The enormity of what happened in One Direction creates a massive bond and we’ll always have that.

"There have been times when we’ve done each other’s heads in. There might be something I say in an interview that bugs Liam or vice versa, but we all know what each other is like and we can call each other up and say sorry for being a d**k. We’re like brothers.”

But that’s not necessarily the case with Zayn, who quit in 2015 and with whom Louis has had a turbulent relationship since. He was hurt when Zayn was the only one not to turn up at the X Factor studio to support him through his performance after Jay’s death, despite promising to be there.

Then there’s Zayn’s apparent repeated digs. In one interview he branded 1D’s music “generic as f**k”. There’s a difference between making a break from the past and dismissing it completely, and it’s a line Zayn perhaps hasn’t always managed to walk.

“Hmm,” agrees Louis, cautiously. “Other than maybe Niall, there is no one who is prouder of the band and the songs we created than me. But while what I did with One Direction is relevant, it doesn’t define who I am and I don’t struggle to make that dissociation.”

Does he think some of what Zayn has said has been disrespectful?

“Yeah, I do. But I can understand it. We have a lot of situations where we’re sat in interviews and if you’re in a certain mood you might run your mouth. The older you get the more you can tell if these things actually carry any malice or if they’re just a prod in the back. That’s life, innit? Sometimes people chat s**t and that’s the reality.”

He’s not ruling out resolving their differences in the future, but there’s no olive branch on the horizon.

“No, but I’ve not actively tried. We’ve all got a lot on our plates and there might be a day where I wake up and think: ‘OK, I want to right that wrong’, but not yet.”

After being in his company for a while, it’s not hard to see why Louis was 1D’s driving force backstage. He’s thoughtful, articulate, open and self-aware, but there’s a steeliness to him and the requisite pop-star swagger, which doesn’t seem to spill over into arrogance.

He’s based in LA these days, to stay close to Freddie, but “Donny” will always be home. He says comparing the two places is “literally chalk and cheese” and it’s taken him time to “come round” to living in the States.

“It’s taken a while to get used to spending so much time there. I feel like I’m very British at heart.”

And that is reflected in his music, which is heavily influenced by the Arctic Monkeys, The Smiths and Oasis. In fact, the title track and latest single Walls sounds so similar to Oasis B-side and fans’ favourite Acquiesce that Louis’ manager flagged it as a potential issue.

“These kinds of things happen. There are only so many melodies you can write and if you listen to a band all the time like I do with Oasis…”

Anyway, says Louis. He had to make a choice.

“I was ready to risk it, but everyone said we should get in touch with Noel [Gallagher] so we did. Often the industry, and especially Noel’s world, can be a bit snobby and say: ‘F**k you you’re not using this song’. But he was really cool about it, signed it off no problem and although I’m sure he’s not happy about this, I f**king am, I’ve got a writing credit from Noel Gallagher on my album. That is some sick s**t so I’m buzzing.”

Is he nervous about going it alone? “I think I’ve got a good record so I’m confident. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t little bit nervous – there’s three and half years work gone into it so there’s a level of anticipation.”

The most overwhelming emotion though, is relief.

“Because it’s taken such a long time. I’m excited to go on to the next phase of my career.”

Louis Tomlinson’s new album Walls is out now.

#unedited #lt news #lt interview #fabulous 2020 #walls promo #2.2.20 #elounor 2.0 #baby stunt #1d mention

[cindylouwho-2]

RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, May 2 2020

Welcome to my latest summary of recent ecommerce news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & Etsy! This covers articles I came across since the late April report, although some may be older than that. I will do my best to keep posting these at least once every 10 days if not sooner. 

Have any topics you would like to see me cover in more detail? Drop me a line here on Tumblr, or email me through my website. I’m also on Twitter and YouTube if you prefer social.  

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES 

If you sell on Etsy, this is your reminder that the Offsite Ads program kicks in on May 4, and people who make under $10K a year on Etsy can opt out if they want to avoid the additional fees. I have a summary here. 

Issues with mail delivery during the pandemic continue. Canada Post has suspended on time delivery guarantees and warns of December level volume.  USPS is not shipping to 113 countries, including many APO addresses. 

I am still interested in posting articles and lists of resources for small businesses and artists during the pandemic, so please pass on any good resources you know about. HubSpot did a page for Australia, and one for the United States.  See my previous edition for a longer list. 

ETSY NEWS 

Mask sales have created a huge boom for Etsy, but also some busts. “Suddenly millions of people were logging on to Etsy, searching for masks nine times every second, the company calculated.The site was not ready for the rush….There are now 50,000 sellers on Etsy who have each sold at least one mask; 10,000 have sold at least 100. Etsy staff spent time calling the most popular sellers to weed out scams, but also to ensure well-meaning sellers were not over-promising.” There have been many threads from sellers whose shops were de-indexed due to both bots and to Etsy wanting to limit their sales until they catch up on open orders, creating a lot of complaints at a time when their customer service response is hugely delayed. 

Some sellers report receiving listing credits for masks, although several who received money did not sell masks, and many others who did sell masks got nothing. 

Another Seller Handbook post on what people are looking for while they are under lockdown (TL;DR: home decor, activities, bath & beauty) , as well as suggestions for how you can pivot your shop. They include the top search terms for each area; some examples: washable paper towel, garden, birthday gift,  printable wall art, puzzle, board game, puzzle adult. “As shoppers transform their living spaces for multifunctional uses like working, exercising, and homeschooling, they’re looking for cozy comfort as well as fresh, on-season style updates that offer mood-boosting appeal….113% YoY increase in searches on Etsy for “home office...127% YoY increase in searches on Etsy for “indoor garden...“Face mask” was the top searched term for the last five weeks (as of April 23, 2020)” Finally, “In recent Etsy buyer research, one third of shoppers who anticipated purchasing on Etsy in the next three months reported planning to buy gifts.” [Although the article doesn’t mention this, I strongly recommend emphasizing somewhere in your shop that you can send the order directly to the gift recipient, if you sell giftable items but sales are down right now. I am getting a lot more requests for gift notes than usual, and more people are paying for tracking so they know when the gift arrives.]

A study says that 30% of Etsy sellers do not save for emergencies, and 74% want Etsy to help them when emergencies arise. 

Two new features for users of Etsy’s USPS labels: free pick up requests, and easy customer return labels. 

Etsy launched an exclusive collection with Joseph Altuzarra. 

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES 

Moz just came out with an excellent guide to keyword research that you all should at least bookmark to come back to later, even if you don’t do keyword research now. The introduction contains a good definition of long tail with a graph; “Only about 20% of the keywords people search for will be popular "head" terms. The majority of keyword phrases will be less-frequent, long-tail keywords.” There’s even a downloadable 2-page cheat sheet on the basics at the end. 

There may have been a Google search update around April 16, but I am mostly posting this article for the graphs showing search volatility in the past 1-2 months; those changes in the second half of March into early April seem to be mostly user-driven due to the pandemic, rather than algorithm changes. 

Backlinks are not all created equal, and time is sometimes one of the factors in weighting them. [text and video] 

This analysis of near 12 million Google search results turned up some interesting correlations with ranking. Not surprisingly, sites in first place have many more backlinks on average than the other sites on the same page. It was a bit surprising to learn that page loading speed didn’t correlate with ranking at all (that may change once everyone goes to mobile first indexing in the fall), nor did using the keyword in your title tag. “Pages in Google’s top 10 results contain 65% to 85% of the keywords that they’re ranking for in their title tag. However, we found very little (if any) correlation between keyword-optimized title tags and higher rankings on the first page.”

Google may delay its move to complete mobile-first indexing by September, depending on how sites are managing due to the recent disruptions.

Some businesses are moving the money they spent on advertising over to SEO, because there is a longer-term payoff vs. a short term impact from someone seeing an ad on a given day. Good SEO can get you ranking on many search engines for years, if you are lucky. 

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

Not surprisingly, the top times for social media traffic have changed during the pandemic; here’s an updated list. 

Thinking of starting a YouTube channel? Here’s a beginner’s manual including screenshots on how to set it up, as well as tips on YouTube SEO & other marketing tactics. 

Don’t know what to put in your email newsletters? HubSpot picked 17 examples they think are awesome. 

Facebook rapidly revamped & expanded its video chat option to compete with Zoom & Houseparty, called Messenger Rooms. Note that “Room calls are not end-to-end encrypted, but Facebook says it does not view or listen to calls.” The are also working on the ability to charge people to watch live streams. 

Twitter had a good first quarter but the stock still fell because it does not look like they are recovering from the pandemic effects very quickly. 

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

As mentioned in my last edition, Google Shopping is now offering free listings on its US platform, and rolled out a bit early for some even though the start date was given as April 27. Your Etsy listings will not be shown in the free ads if you opt out of Etsy’s Offsite Ads program, and you are not allowed to add marketplace listings to GS yourself, but this may be something you are interested in for your website, if you sell to the US. Some tips on setting up Merchant accounts correctly for this here and here, and optimizing your listings here. If your standalone is on Shopify, they have instructions here. 

As ad prices are dropping for some items on some platforms, it has become easier for small businesses to start campaigns, especially experienced online sellers who can now take advantage of the ecommerce boom. [I agree with this for the right types of items or service, but I don’t think it is going to work for everything.]

New to online advertising, and don’t know where to start? HubSpot has a good introductory overview here, with details on the main options available. 

Google is offering ad credits to small & medium sized businesses as pandemic relief, starting in late May. Note that you need to have been running ads last year with Google to be eligible. . 

Google Ad users will soon need to submit proof of identity & location, starting with US users. The move is to help prevent scammers and increase transparency. Early response to the announcement is mixed. 

Facebook is no longer forcing advertisers to use its Campaign Budget Optimization, meaning businesses will continue to be able to set different budgets across all of their campaigns. 

STATS, DATA, OTHER TRACKING 

If you have an ecommerce site built with Wordpress, here’s how to track your email newsletter clicks through Google Analytics. 

And for your ecommerce site, the best alerts to set up in GA. 

Bing Webmaster Tools has a great feature that tracks traffic to connected accounts other than your website or blog - but Twitter has been removed from this list. 

There are far more Instagram analytics apps than I thought. 

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS 

Many ecommerce platforms/website providers are being pressured to reduce the fake COVID-19 disinfectants on their sites, including eBay, Facebook, Shopify & Alibaba.

There is a new app that lets buyers shop with multiple businesses who run their sites through Shopify, called Shop. Among other things, it will feature businesses local to the user: “A recent survey of global consumers by Ernst & Young found that 34% of respondents are willing to pay more for local products amid the pandemic.”

Shopify’s stock is flying high right now, and it has become the second-most valuable company in Canada, in part due to the surge of sign ups after the start of the pandemic. 

Since page loading speed is important to buyer conversions as well as SEO, if you have a Shopify site, you will want to read about which themes are the fastest & slowest to load. A few are ridiculously slow, & you will want to consider your goals if you are thinking of using them. 

Jeff Bezos has moved back to managing Amazon operations due to the pandemic. “Bezos was also personally involved in Amazon’s decision to suspend third-party vendors from shipping non-essential items to Amazon’s warehouses, helping ease the load on workers so that they could more efficiently ship goods like baby products, groceries, pet supplies and personal care products.  He also signed off on Amazon’s move to halt tactics it normally uses “to encourage customers to put more items in their shopping carts”.

Meanwhile, Amazon VP states that Amazon has done a lot for sellers during the pandemic, including suspending “repayment of all Amazon Lending loans for sellers in the United States and the United Kingdom until April 30.” I guess that is why their profit fell to only $2.5 billion in the first quarter of 2020 despite their gross sales being up 29% due to the pandemic buying. 

Amazon’s pilot program for verifying new sellers by video calls is continuing; contrary to previous reports, they say they are not using facial-recognition technology, but they are checking photo ID against the video call. 

eBay has extended its suspension of most seller performance standard rules until June 19 for sellers in the UK. They are also extending their free listing offers, and after banning mask sales are now apparently envying Etsy’s sales and are encouraging sellers to make fabric masks.They are also planning a way to confirm sales that involve local pickups [podcast & transcript]. 

eBay had lower 1st quarter results than they & others had predicted, so the stock went down. Here is the call transcript for those interested. 

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

The pandemic sales trends have switched from hoarding essentials to food & home comfort items. “As spring eased toward summer, cooking at home also began to include gardening. "We see continued growth in gardening," said Ventry. ... Growing herbs, he said, played well with the home cooking trend, too. "We saw similar trends from 2008 to 2010, during the recession."

Ecommerce sales are way up, perhaps 50% up in the US right now, and some of these people will continue their increased online shopping, so it is a good time to launch many types of new campaigns. (warnings - some “not safe for work” language) 

HubSpot has been producing a weekly pandemic report on its customers core business stats, such as website traffic & sales rates. They speculate that we might be seeing a bit of an overall recovery as of last week. 

MISCELLANEOUS

There are still more good work-from-home articles coming out that can also be relevant for those of us who have been doing this for a while now. Using a schedule to be more productive is a common topic. As is managing to be productive with kids around. 

#SEO #search engine marketing #EtsyNews #statistics #Ecommerce #smallbiz #Onlinemarketing

[comicteaparty]

March 28th-April 3rd, 2020 Creator Babble Archive

The archive for the Creator Babble   chat that occurred from March 28th, 2020 to April 3rd, 2020.  The chat focused on the following question:

How many hours do you work on your comic per week, and how do you manager to balance that with other responsibilities?

Holmeaa - working on WAYFINDERS

heheh So we are.. cheating a bit Both me and my coworker are unemployed, and is working on hour comic, like was it a full time job. It is our passion project, and dream that we can work and live of makeing comics. In Denmark you can apply for grants from the government, but you need to have releashed a book before that is possible. We are useing the comic, to show potentional clients in the future what we can do. For now we are working on it from 09:00-17:00 ish (with a long lunch break) while applying for other kinds of grants, and also does all the things we are supposed to to get our unemplyment money, and searching for jobs, and freelance gigs, gathering the courage to start our own small company (not right now though) and yeaah time will tell

carcarchu

@Holmeaa - working on WAYFINDERS that doesn't sound like cheating to me? more like using the tools at your disposal to turn your passion into a viable career

Holmeaa - working on WAYFINDERS

hehe it feels a little like cheating! there are some debates about if it is okay or not, but we think that strengthening our skills is a good use of our time

eli [a winged tale]

Haha also not cheating! It’s great you’re using the time to chase the dream I’m curious what’s your breakdown for those time working on the comic? As for me, usually 1-2 hours a day with a bit more on the weekend if time permits. These days with the quarantine it’s about 2-3 h a day

DanitheCarutor

Since I'm unemployed until who knows when I've been working on my comic between 40-50 hours a week about 6 to 7 days a week... most weeks. Some days, like update day or chore day, I hardly work on the comic or don't work on it at all. Admittedly I'm not the best at balancing drawing with other responsibilities, sometimes I get so into it that I forget about daily house chores, other weeks I do the opposite and only do house chores which makes me totally behind of comic stuff. I can't seem to find a good middle ground, it always turns into completely focusing on one or the other.

eli [a winged tale]

Yeah when I get in the zone, time flies and life gets put to the wayside

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

So I have no school or work, so the webcomic has become almost a fulltime project for me

I average about 10 hours per day working on it, not counting on chores and exercise

Another thing I worry about is the possibility of carpal tunnel syndrome, which is why I've been relentless with exercise, too

I guess it's just a combination of relentless reminders and also sheer willpower that gets me to do other responsibilities haha

@eli [a winged tale] also I know that feeling

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

So since my school had to cancel, I have to be more responsible for my online course. Sometimes I give myself 2 days off each week to work more into my upcoming webcomic but I have to switch my mind for school work, online classes. Also extra time for food. I need to get back into exercise or I feel exhausted more easily. I keep a wall schedule so that I make it a routine to write what I'll do every 3 or 5 days, to keep my active brain reminded(edited)

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

I spent the majority of last year (fun)employed (partially by choice, partially not! my previous job let me go rather unceremoniously... and I needed a hiatus anyway... so it worked out) so I poured a lot more hours into that chapter of Phantomarine than I usually did. I worked on it almost every day - at least for a couple of hours, but sometimes up to a full eight-hour day. That number has dipped tremendously since I’ve gone back to work, but I’m spreading the same amount of time out in a broader way. I’m trying to get a good buffer during my hiatus, so I can work and draw in a healthy balance. I don’t have crazy overtime at my current job like I did at my last one, so that’s already a comfort. I’m confident I’ll be able to hit a good stride once the comic returns in June (edited)

eli [a winged tale]

Can’t wait Lady!!

Feather J. Fern

Two part time jobs, and school killed my comic, but I been working on getting one panel done a day, which is around 30minutes to an hour if possible.

eli [a winged tale]

My routine used to be rendering on the commute but now just once in am and once pm until this limbo time is clarified

That’s awesome Feather! It’s so rewarding when everything comes together after putting effort everyday

Feather J. Fern

Once school is done in two more weeks I will be more free to do things so I hope to get maybe two panels done in a day XD

Online school, stupid quarantine

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

Due to the pandemic im mostly off school and my part time job so i spend like 4-5 hours on my comic per day. Still would like try to get a page done per day but lmao digital painting is slowwww

eli [a winged tale]

What’s everyone’s tips for breaks/stretches/balance? I feel like I certainly need to revisit these to avoid burnout and continue feeling motivated!

Feather J. Fern

Actually there was a cool manga artist who's tip was literally he only worked working hours. His mornings are free and since manga was his job, he worked form 12-6, giving him 2 hours to do other work he needs to get done, and takes morning walks and stuff.

Another person I know had "No working weekends" as a thing becuase they are a freelancer.

I personally have try to make sure I ahve a routine, and actually, stretch before drawing.

Streetch before, during a break, and then after, to keep that body nice and warmed up

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

Health-wise there's this hing for your : every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds. I'm not good at following this, but when I do it, it helps a lot.

Cronaj (Whispers of the Past)

Despite the current pandemic, my work-life hasn't changed much (unless you count stress getting in the way). I am currently "unemployed," but I do consider comicking my full-time job. I am also not very good at balancing work and life. Something's always gotta give. Last year, I worked at a job that basically ruined my ability to work on my comic. I worked 30-40 hours typically, ruined my sleep schedule, took work home sometimes, and was constantly exhausted. This is what resulted in my year and a half long hiatus, and it's what drove me to work like hell on my comic when I quit. Now (when I'm in the groove and not suffering from art block), I typically spend 60-70 hours on my comic and get 2-3 pages done: - 30 hours sketching (I know, ridiculous) - 5 hours filling in base colors - 20-25 hours painting - 5 hours adding text, speech bubbles, sfx, and finishing touches - 1-2 hours formatting for Webtoon I also spend some time throughout the week typing up the script, doing concept art for things coming in the future of the comic, and preparing for conventions, but I can't tell you exactly how much time.

eli [a winged tale]

Thanks for the breakdown! I’m always keen to learn from everyone and seeing how the workflow is like for different people

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

oh don't forget to do wrist stretches!

eli [a winged tale]

Ahh formatting time is always so tedious for me!

Yes wrist exercises! Any recommendations?

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

hmmm well the easiest one is literally just shaking it out

like every hour

and I also like to hold my arm out parallel, point my fingers up and using my other hand to pull the fingers back so i'm stretching the wrist

then I point the fingers down and pull on the fingers until my wrist is stretching

eli [a winged tale]

Awesome. Will be adopting those!

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

I'm pretty fast. 2-6 hours per page, depending on how detailed it is. Average of 3-4. I could probably do 2 pages/ week easily enough, but don't want to do more than that. I'm the kind of person who always needs to be doing a million different things. I need to leave time for my other hobbies and my paintings and my academics and extracurriculars. Otherwise I'd get burnt out doing one thing only

Holmeaa - working on WAYFINDERS

@eli [a winged tale] So since it is both me and @Q (Wayfinders: Off Course) working, we start with working on a rough each, our goal is one step (so rough, ink, color) for two pages pr day, pr person. So in a weak the goal is four finished pages a week, and then we upload 3 pages per week. So it is divided that in the morning we start at 09:00 in the morning, maybe checking mail, being practical or whatever. Then we work until 12:00 were we eat lunch, go for a long nice walk and then we go back to work between 13:00 and 14:00 ish and then work until 17:00 when we begin to prepare dinner. Then of course breaks inbetween

Q (Wayfinders: Off Course)

It’s pretty wild to be able to dedicate your entire day to comics like that

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

damn you all work fast

do you guys have any tips on how to work on a webcomic faster?

Cronaj (Whispers of the Past)

Lol, I wish!

Still looking for those magical secrets

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

@shadowhood (SunnyxRain) You know the 80-20 rule? You can get 80% of the result with 20% of the effort? My comic is very messy if you zoom in. I don't spend time making sure the linework or the coloring is perfectly clean. Also, I'm pretty fast at drawing figures. I used to practice figure drawing a lot by rushing to draw strangers irl before they moved, or by drawing a bunch of fast figures from the free figure drawing model websites online. I've also taken a figure drawing course (didn't even have to pay because it was part of my university! Even if you don't have that option you can probably find free life drawing sessions on Meetup or similar!) which really helped me streamline my process for drawing people

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

Oh I see! Yes, I used to take life drawing classes too! And your response makes me feel a lot better

I tend to be a bit messy with inking, and since i'm a perfectionist a lot of my time is wasted on editing/clean up

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

I've seen cronaj draw, and while I think the results look excellent, I think her method is a kind of inefficient. She draws like a printer, nearly finishing one detailed body part before moving on the the next. I think maybe if she drew in a more classical way, going from a gesture drawing to progressively more detailed, it might help her be faster and her poses more cohesive and dynamic. Maybe working on 1 or 5 min figures would help? Practicing things like this?

eli [a winged tale]

Yeah I try to do figure practices for efficiency

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

I heard that there are some online life drawing vids you can follow too

but what are your experiences with online life drawing vids versus the real thing

like is there a real difference?

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

found some of my old 1 minutes

To me there's not too much difference

I've heard some people say that life drawing is either way easier or way harder though. Because of your depth perception when looking at a real person

But the bruises on my legs can attest to my horrid depth perception haha. That might be why I don't notice a difference

Actually those previous sketches might be 30 seconds? I don't remember

I would recommend you try both but right now we pretty much only have the online option haha

eli [a winged tale]

Yeah I’ve done both and I think irl creates complexity with depth and the interactions with others etc is helpful but online is my go to for flexibility

I think having a process streamlined will make things more efficient. The downside is that it might feel tedious and I do switch it up from time to time for variety

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

Might feel uncomfortable but that's how you know you're improving

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

There is a TON of difference for me. I HAVE to look at a physical model in front of me.

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

Can't get better if you always do the same things

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

This is what my brain does.

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

I wonder- could drawing yourself in a mirror be a decent substitute?

If youre lucky you might also be able to ask an SO or roommate to model for you. Should probably pay them back by cooking for them or something though

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

Brain: sees a real model in front of me Brain: translates 3D to 2D, result: drawing Brain: sees a photo/video of a model Brain: SHIT. That's supposed to be 3D, isn't it? Brain: Translates 2D to 3D (basically re-constructing it in my head, or attempting to re-construct) so that it can translate it back to 2D Brain: BSOD

There's some online resources out there that have "3D" photos... you know, two near-identical images side by side, so if you look at it cross-eyed, it becomes 3D?

But I can't do those because I get a headache X'D

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

Just thinking about drawing from that makes me dizzy

eli [a winged tale]

Oh interesting!

Yeah maybe looking out the window to draw people would be the way to go...

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

But maybe figure drawing in VR exists?

eli [a winged tale]

Balcony figure drawings

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

I live on the top floor so those are going to be some very small figures

eli [a winged tale]

For ants

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

Once this coronavirus thing is over, there's lots of ways you can do gesture drawings from just random people -- bus stops, cafes, museums (I have not done this, but people who have done this report this is really good because others assume you're drawing the artworks. XD)

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

I've done this a lot

Sometimes I've even shown people drawing of themselves if they've turned out particularly nice

They've always taken it well

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

I like drawing my professors because they use hand gestures a lot when they talk

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

Airport was REALLY good for finding people stuck in one pose indefinitely

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

they alwayas laugh when I show them

eli [a winged tale]

Shadow omg I do that too

Draws classmates

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

yeah the only issue i have with drawing classmates

is that they're always doing the "i'm using my phone" pose

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

Become the master of drawing people on their phones

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

Maybe try drawing children on the playground?

This works better if you're a woman

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

oh thank jesus

I also like going to the zoo or the museum

or the aquarium if i'm feeling adventurous

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

I am a University student so I also have some pretty interestng drawings of people asleep in weird poses

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

I really need to start going to weekly figure drawing sessions once this is over (there's one here... 20 min drive... 8AM Saturdays )

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

ditto or just go to the park and draw

and @Eightfish (Puppeteer) I've had some.....weird poses from all my profs

one guy was incredibly hard to draw; he was VERY enthusiastic about showing us knife skills

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

The parks here are too spacious, to a degree where it's weird to get close enough to people

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

Bring binoculars

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

Don't worry ma'am I'm an artist

nothing sketchy

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

(except my sketch)

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

A+ pun right there

another place to go for figure drawing

theaters

like.....opera/plays

I once tried drawing the men dancing in the Newsies musical

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

Tried that once, but it took me out of the performance

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

same i was dazzled by dancing men

aaaaand then i abandoned sketching at all when they started throwing newspaper strips into the audience

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

But they were giving you free paper!

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

THEY WERE

i'll take what i can get

Cronaj (Whispers of the Past)

@Eightfish (Puppeteer) While I agree that my method of drawing is "inefficient," I do not draw like a printer. There are videos of people drawing like a printer and it's not what I'm doing. I have done gesture drawing before, but it always looked incredibly abstract, and not quite like people, which is fine, but not what I'm going for. I treat gesture drawing like a warm-up exercise. It doesn't really do anything for my end result, but gets my drawing muscles stretched out.(edited)

eli [a winged tale]

Gesture drawings are definitely a good warmup!

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

Perhaps it was an inappropriate analogy. What works for me I guess wouldn't work for everyone. I was trying to offer advice because whenever you talk about how much time you spend on art and you work life balance it's commendable but also dismaying. I hope you find something that works for you in the future

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

Oh god.. I sometimes work 6 hours a day. I guess thats like 30 hours a week? Crazy to think about, it's like a full job

Oooh you guys are sharing figure drawings... I swant to show some of mine

Behold

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

My figure drawing usually breaks down into like, medical anatomy study. I feel like I understand body shapes better by including the muscles & bones

carcarchu

ABS the most important figure study

Deo101 [Millennium]

ah figure drawing? I love figure drawing ^^

I do like a lot but this kinda thing is most of it

anyways as for the question at hand, I do a lot of different things for my comics weekly. My millennium pages take me 2-6 hours i would say, but I also have patreon things I need to do so I'd say i spend 10-15 hours on it a week. for my other comic, I spend about 6 hours an update, and it updates every other week. but honestly, all of my free time goes to assorted comics. If i'm not working on school work or chatting with people, I'm working on things for patreon, potential merch, or other comics I want to start sometime.

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

Oooh nice poses!!’

Deo101 [Millennium]

thanks!! I have a ton of gesture/figure drawings but these ones are my most recent that I have saved to my computer i think

10 minutes im pretty sure. very good for speeding up

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

Those look really nice, good values

Deo101 [Millennium]

thanks ^^ I really hate working in charcoal honestly, it kinda always winds up hurting my body somehow, but its very quick sooooooo

kayotics

My answer for the prompt question has changed a lot since I started quarantine lmao... I used to do about 10 hours of work throughout the week on my comic page (usually after work, I have an office job) but ironically it’s gotten harder while I work from home. I’ve been struggling to find time since I don’t have a separation between work and home now, and putting the boundaries up of “I’m not always available” to coworkers is difficult.

Also on figure studies: they’re a great way to practice speed. I use the concepts of figure drawings all the time.

RebelVampire

@kayotics As someone who always works from home doing remote contract work, I have to say I think this is something a lot of people underestimate about work at home life. In that it's sometimes really difficult to establish boundaries with ppl and make them understand you aren't always available and also aren't gonna work billions of hours of overtime. So I'm sorry to hear that's affecting your comic work.

Shadowmark Productions

I work anywhere from 6-8 hours a day on comic stuff. That’s an average though. Sometimes I slack and need to pull all nighters to make up for it. Yes, I am terrible at time management. They say entrepreneurs are the only people willing to work 80 hours a week for themselves so they do not have to work 40 hours a week for someone else. I guess webcomic creators are the only people willing to work 80+ hours a week so that they can... go to work for someone else afterwards

AntiBunny

4 days of procrastinating, 1 of procrastinating and hating myself, and 2 of actual comic drawing seems to make up my weekly comic making schedule. :p

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

I can only imagine how stressed I would be if I forced myself to update weekly

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

This is a hard question to answer because it varies a lot depending on my energy levels. Ideally I’d spend several hours a day on comics, but realistically I draw as much as possible when I have the energy (5+ hours a day for as many days in a row as I can handle it) and then go weeks or months too tired to do comics. On average, barring any long periods of exhaustion or other interruptions from RL, I spend about 20+ hours a week making pages for my comics.

sagaholmgaard

I prefer to work on my comic for about an hour ever morning and maybe 2-3 hours in the evening, that's the ideal routine for me. Right now I sadly have a lot of schoolwork to do (writing my thesis) so i might get less than 30 minutes in the morning and then feel rlly tired in the evening so I dont get as much time then either. but oh well!

I can still work for 4-5 hours on the weekends so I manage ^^(edited)

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

The whole stay-indoors order's currently completely wrecked my pattern, but before that I did between 3-4 hours a day.

Shadowmark Productions

Can’t imagine the stress of a daily or even weekly posting schedule. Hats off.

#ctparchive #comics #webcomics #indie comics #comic chat #comic discussion #creator babble #creator interview #comic creator interview #comic tea party #ctp

[emaildiscoverytool-blog]

SME Productivity: A Simple Guide to leverage Tech and build a Repeatable Sales Engine

We are once again in unique times. In the short term, we need to deal with COVID-19, to put up a good medical and economic response.

This will have a trickle-down effect across the different spectrums in the economy. From consumer behaviours to avoid places of congregation, to projects being cancelled from tapered down financial projections, to companies cutting costs to protect the bottom line, to the government putting up a supportive fiscal stance.

The strongest steel is forged by the fires of hell. Through antifragility, when positioned correctly, stressors make people, company, processes stronger.

In the longer term, we see many structural changes. One of which we are privy to is tech displaced unemployment, and subsequently, rising income inequality.

The once iron rice bowl jobs are not so iron cladded after all. We see less of lifetime job security today. Business disruptions come and go so quickly, companies need to stay competitive, and one of the ways to do so is to maintain the most productive workforce possible and this comes at the cost of the less equipped. Also, a way to run a productive workforce is to leverage technology i.e. Marketing Tech, give employees the right tools to >1x their output.

Remote working helps to increase operational cost-efficiency

The evolution of remote working (quote) happened slowly, and then all at once. Many companies are experiencing remote working for the first time, and many of the practices will be here to stay, as companies and employees realize the benefits.

From a business perspective, the benefits of running a remote, distributed workforce are aplenty. You can save on fixed overheads (rent). This is a big cost item for many companies. Use the savings on unnecessary rent and pay better employee benefits. I agree that for certain professional service industries, having a primely located, the well-renovated office is important for servicing clients - so there is no way to go about it. Software companies are prime business models to go remote, because, there are no hardware/capital-goods.

By having formal remote hiring practices in place, one can hire for the most cost-efficient talent globally.  (Yes, MTI Singapore, I also understand the civic consciousness hire locally at the same time #smilyface#).

To build best-practice remote working processes in your company, GitLab is a good company to follow. They are known to be the world's largest all-remote company and they have open-sourced their employee's handbook here - https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/.

A key consideration to note about remote working is that it is not the ability to work from home, but the ability to work asynchronously. You can batch process your work items and be easily interrupted, as compared to you working in an office and having someone shouting over your shoulder every now and then. No single task should ever be urgent. Replies should only be made after thoughtful thinking, there is little pressure to reply in real-time. All business processes should be documented clearly, made very transparent and there should be little second-guessing. Business KPIs should be put on a dashboard for performance evaluation and coaching, at both the micro (staff) level and macro-level (company), so everyone is aligned.

Software and Technology allows for greater productivity leverage

Essentially, when we think deeper, all non-creative tasks can be automated. Creative tasks would be nurturing real relationships and building the processes themselves.

For example, for today's white-collar worker, a good >50% of the time is spent on writing and pushing around emails. There are many tools today to help make this process easier, faster, better, or more accuately.

Singapore Budget 2020 has asked for companies to increase productivity by embracing technology, as in recent years. There is the incentive to invest in an upfront effort to build processes that repeat and scales, and automate out the time-wasting, repeated work after.

An HR example -  Instead of doing manual onboarding of employees individually, write detailed process (technical and business) guides for them to refer to, and keep them update for the next employee.

Primer to implement Marketing Tech into your SME business today

Marketing Tech and Advertising Tech have both been intriguing, the more I dive deeper into it. Essentially, it is how tech companies track user data and to monetise the data, or resell the data to be monetised by another party.

Most of these revolve around leaving tracking cookies on the browser or tracking the device fingerprint as it moves around sites. If you are not paying for the product, you are the product (to the preying companies who want to capture your data and then ad attention). Sometimes, it is better off paying a fair sum to use the SaaS, get rid of the ads and most importantly, get access to the customer service.

How the user's Sales & Marketing Lifecycle can be augmented with technology

We will map the user's lifecycle journey, from the top of the funnel to the end of the user's life cycle, and how each of the stages can be augmented and made better with technology.

We as a company, Rocketship Pte. Ltd., have deployed most of the SaaS tools which we will share with you. You can see this from the chatbots and newsletter campaigns.

For the perspective of the Sales Team, the lifecycle of a user goes like this - (1) Pre-sales, (2) Sales, (3) Post-sales and (4) Customer Retention. You will soon notice most of the MarTech is focused on the Pre-sales segment because the prospecting stage requires more engagement then the retention stage.

1/4 Presales

1) Social Media

What you want to do is to have a united platform to post and manage user interactions. The key social media site Rocketship Pte. Ltd. is running on are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. These are in fact the standard ones for most businesses. I don't really expect leads to come in from these channels, but rather to put up a 'brand voice' out there. One thing I dislike from using a platform to post is that the resulting post comes with Post Via Platform, I rather have this not appear. As a result, most of the posts are posted using the native platforms manually. It doesn't require too much time if done right.

Zoho Social: https://www.zoho.com/social/

Hootsuite: https://hootsuite.com/

Buffer: https://buffer.com/

2) Email Campaign + Forms

Running an optimized email campaign is the bread and butter for most startup today. Emails can be done very effectively, or very ineffectively. Sending an email is almost free and you can usually get your message out for a pinpointed target audience. Compared to pay-per-click Google Ads where a typically popular SaaS related keyword can cost between $5 to $20 per click. Running good email campaigns may come with technical learning curves, like figuring out SPF / DKIM domain verification, best practices to ensure healthy IP reputation etc. Also, don't send email blindly, try to send it with a CRM so you have awareness of the user's response to your email - most important is your email opened?

Zoho Campaign: https://www.zoho.com/campaigns/

SendGrid: https://sendgrid.com/

MailJet: https://www.mailjet.com/

3) Page Optimization and Page Tracking

This is used to understand how the user behaves on your website. How actions they perform, and what stages do they break off from your website. It is also useful to run personalization campaigns i.e. you can set a customised landing page of your use, based off the information you know of the user.

The example of information you can glimpse off your visitor data can be:

Current Url

Referral URL

Query Parameter

Source

Location

Visitor Type

Device Type

Browser

Operating System

Day of Week

Hour of the Day

Mobile OS

JS Variable

User

Visitor Activity

Weather

The weather feature is intriguing. So basically, you can triangulate your user's location from the IP address and determine what product you want to show the user i.e. show winter coat when temperatures are low.

We can also run A/B testing experiments to what UI elements will trigger the user to perform a conversion action. Also, session recording and heatmaps, to see part of your website are hot spots for user eyeballs.

Zoho PageSense: https://www.zoho.com/pagesense/

Optimizely: https://www.optimizely.com/

AB Tasty: https://www.abtasty.com/

Hotjar: https://www.hotjar.com/

4) Analytics

Google Analytics: https://analytics.google.com/

Facebook Pixel: https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-ads-pixel

5) Chatbots

Live chat for customer support, you can connect this with CRM, you can track how users interact with your sites. Also, you can connect your chatbots with AI scripts to generate pre-programmed replies to user inputs.

Zoho Sales IQ: https://www.zoho.com/salesiq/

Intercom: https://www.intercom.com/

Tidio: https://www.tidio.com/

2/4 Sales

1) CRM

The CRM will be your key workhorse for Sales Productivity. You track each user interactions. You can use the CRM to reach them across channels (telephone, email, chat, social) and log the info in the CRM, to be shared across your team. You can also set notifications when the user interacts in a defined manner. Over time, you may start to see predictable patterns use this to optimize your outbound campigns.

Zoho CRM: https://www.zoho.com/crm/

Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/

HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/

2) Sign

Going forward, in a penless & paperless world, business agreements are done via e-signatures. Documents can be easily archived, search and shared around in virtual file folders and not physical drawers like before. There are many players in this space and they all seem to do a fine job.

Zoho Sign: https://www.zoho.com/sign/

DocuSign: https://www.docusign.com/

HelloSign: https://www.hellosign.com/

3) Meeting

Video conferencing replaces the physical meeting in the remote working universe. The new generation of video conferencing software allows for automated meeting reminders, recording and polling features.

Zoom: https://zoom.us/

Google Hangouts: https://hangouts.google.com/

Zoho Meeting: https://www.zoho.com/meeting/

4) Payments

Collect and manage subscription plans.

Stripe: https://stripe.com/

5) Chat

You need to communicate effectively within your company with good tracking and apps integration. Also, maintain the conversion across platforms as you move around i.e. desktop to mobile.

Slack: https://slack.com/

3/4 Post-Sales

1) Accounting

Track your company's health and keep your accounting organized for filing and fundraising.

Wave: https://www.waveapps.com/

Xero: https://www.xero.com/

2) Invoicing

Emails and invoices often get lost in translation when so many things are going on. Integrate an invoicing tool with your CRM and set automated invoicing when the time comes.

Zoho Invoice: https://www.zoho.com/invoice/

3) Help desk

When your number of users start to skyrocket and chats/emails are unable to catch up with the enquire volume, use a ticketing system. Triage customer enquires, assign them to support staff and track the customer service render.

Zoho Desk: https://www.zoho.com/desk/

Freshdesk: https://freshdesk.com/

4/4 Continued engagement

Engage with Email + Social Media

How to go about building a repeatable, scalable Sales Engine

As business managers, we need to build processes that ultimately work by themselves, with or without our intervention, and not attribute the success of a sales channel to luck, or getting lucky from networking. Ideally, we should define and document each role so clearly that staff can be hired, fit into and trained to perform effectively in the roles.

Side note: Back in finance, instead of making discretionary picks that are in a way, still, a gamble to the randomness of the day and getting flustered all over. I rather much-preferred building first principled strategies with an edge that gives you the confidence and calmness to account for various probabilistic outcomes and to put you in a better place than before, and have the wisdom to know when to turn on and off the knobs.

Spend more than proportionate effort to build processes that can compound and run themselves. Also, some lines which I have heard over the years, aim not to be a one-trick pony, aim not to be a one-hit-wonder, but have a framework that works.

Old Sales Techniques vs New Sales Techniques

Old techniques have traditionally been referred to as cold calling or sending generic marketing materials. The old salesman hustle. In reality, buyers are often sick of being sold to, and channels that feel solicitous now naturally becomes a turn-off. The new generation of Sales Technology coupled with new processes take out the guesswork and make the sales process more science and an art. This also makes tracking easier for better accountability for marketing spend.

Inbound Lead Generation Methods

Here is a map of effective inbound marketing methods which we can run today. These techniques require a time investment, they don't happen overnight. Do lesser things, but do the lesser things better.

Referrals

Free tools/ trials

SEO

Blogging

Email and lead nurturing - the most important marketing technique, establish your expertise, build trusts with your audience, promote your product

Webinars - teach something, not sell

Pay per click marketing - the more sophisticated your product in, the more trust-building and education required, SEO + blogging is more useful for sophisticated buyers

Affiliate Marketing

Social media - Puts a human face to the company, but does not immediately drive traffic

Inbound marketing is only one half of the lead generation method, the other half is done through outbound engagement, which is effectively email hunting and prospecting.  This is essentially what Email Discovery Tool is built around for, and to be the best platform to perform outbound email work.

When you go about being your Sales Engine, you first identify and place your staff in the 4 core sales role

Sales Development Rep (SDR)

Market Response Rep (MDR)

Account Executive

Account Manager

Outbound leads will be generated by SDR, inbound leads will be managed and filtered by MDR. Qualified leads from these 2 pipes will be passed onto the (more highly paid) Account Executive to engage and convert. The Account Manager will focus on following up with the user and ensure customer success.

SDRs are the ones who do lead generation, outreach and email hunting. MDR are the ones who process inbound leads from webinars, SEOs, word of mouth and qualify them. Typically, 1 SDR can support 2-5 Account Executive. Separate and run your SDR and MDR teams as specialized teams.

Once the roles are defined, the typical Sales Workflow will include:

Funnelling

1) Prepare and define the ideal target profile, consider the likelihood of winning vs the revenue potential.

2) Add leads into your CRM. This is usually done through buying marketing / emailing lists (this can be expensive, inaccurate and with outdated information, expect around 30% of the list contact to bounce). Or you can use Email Discovery Tool itself (self-plug). You can get emails of pinpointed targets, anywhere in the world, and get the most updated, verified information. Although it's hard work compared to buying off-the-shelf list, you can much better targetting, than just a spray list.

Prospecting

For every full-time SDR, aim to send around 50 emails per day, alongside the mapping calls necessary. I always get asked and told often, how to deal with people that do not respond positively to the email. That may be attributed to the email templates to being not authentic enough, or the emails landing in spam folder rather than the inbox (check your emailing IP reputation). Always use your authentic voice for the messaging, don't fall into the trap of copying and pasting stock templates.

If your email campaign is done right, you should receive a response rate of 10%, be it a positive, negative or neutral response. Also, some industry tips are to send it before 9 am or after 5 pm, so your email does not get lost in the flurry of daily business transactional emails. Avoid Monday (email catch up day from the accumulated weekend if any), or Friday (people just want to go straight to the bar, or back to the family and TGIF).

When you get an email response, there are only 2 actionables for you to follow. You either:

Ask for a redirect - who is the next best person to contact, or

Ask when is best to set up a discussion, for you to find a fit between your product and the target company. If you receive a negative reply, don't be discouraged. It the No does not come from a decision-maker, or from the CEO, the No does not matter. Also, if you receive a No, are you able to handle the objection and rectify it, or did the person say No out of confusion. The rule of thumb is to keep following up (politely) until you get a firm No from a decision-maker.

If you receive a positive reply, your next step will be to get onto call conservation. From there, you sell the dream, help create a vision of a solution that connects your prospect's business issue to your solution.

Set up demos and appointments next. Face to face interaction is crucial in building trust, as you to get to sense the body language and voice of voice, to sense out more information than just textual communication, or communicating behind a video screen. In light of the Covid-19 pandemic of which clients limit external vendor visits and frowning against the physical handshake, be flexible.

As resources permits, build a dashboard to track each individual sales staff person, track how the person is lining up against the given KPIs. Also, give regards to the quality of the leads generated i.e. don't just attribute credit to the SDR after the SDR has passed off the lead to the Account Executive. Let the AE hop on a call with the prospect to double qualify the lead, before giving the SDR the credit. As a manager, use the dashboard to evaluate performance and come in as coach as needed.

Final cold Emailing Tricks in engaging prospects

1) Always try to call/email high, go above your target and get referred down. It's often easier to engage when the boss has given the green light for the VP to explore your product more.

2) Don't be pushy in the way you approach, adopt a mindset of finding out if your product can be a fit for the company.

3) Keep your emails short and succinct. Make your call to action obvious, it can be a question or an ask. If the prospect clams to be not interested, ask why. Ideally, you should keep going until you get a hard No.

Closing

Good luck in navigating the current economic environment, both short term challenges and long term structural changes. I also wish you luck in building a repeatable Engine in your respective roles and domains, so you know, you can have more time for the fun stuff.

#sales #email #b2b #marketing

[dimples-of-discontent]

Hwæt: I'm Waging a Campaign

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,  þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.

(Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney)

Hello friends,

I’m cross-posting this from a CaringBridge site that I could link to but which will reveal my secret IRL identity since the URL is my name for ease of finding! (I actually think that’s fine but, y’know, use the info respectfully since I have worked to have separation between my professional social media and my fandom social media.)

This is an introduction and update on how things are going with my breast cancer. I’ll do some cross-posting, but most updates will be on CaringBridge and, potentially, a sideblog here that will be less family-approved and/or full of reflections on the whole process. I’ll link you to that if I make one. Thanks for all the good wishes and the gentle hellos and the positivity. It has been sustaining and I am lucky in my friends and family here. 💜💜💜

(Author's note! This is a long post with a fair bit of technical stuff that I find fascinating but don't expect you to. It's just hard to know how to catch you all up without going into detail but, if you like, feel free to skip to the last couple paragraphs.)

If you're here that means you already know many of the basic info, which is that about 6 weeks ago I was diagnosed with triple-negative, metastatic breast cancer. It's pretty nasty and aggressive and moved quickly from a large tumor in my left breast to my axillary lymph node to my lungs to the soft tissue next to my spine (with probable bone marrow involvement). It's probably about 6-9 months old. I wasn't looking for it since, at 34 with zero family history, I wasn't even old enough for screenings. But genetic mutations come from somewhere and it looks like I am the mutation.

Is there good news? Not much. (Not yet.) The tiniest bit is that more aggressive cancers tend also to be more responsive to treatment. The fact that it's triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) means that the tumor is negative for the three types of receptors that can be used for additional therapies: progesterone, estrogen, and HER2. (A second test actually put my ER number at 20%...which sounds a little like me in general: although I seem very negative at second glance you'll see that I'm about 20% positive.) It's also negative for androgen. This means that the only potential kind of supplementary therapy that might help along with chemotherapy would be immunotherapy. I'm not a candidate for either surgery or radiation since the spread of the cancer is so pervasive and those are highly localized.

I haven't started treatment yet. For these past weeks I've been in a really difficult phase of undergoing a lot of tests to determine the character, extent, and location of the cancer. This was a surprise to me (and to my parents, who came out to NJ immediately and who have been living with me throughout this process). I sort of imagined that when you got the cancer diagnosis--which I did on January 24th at 11am when I was sitting in my office filling out a performance evaluation for my job at Princeton--they'd rush you off to an emergency room where they'd start treatment immediately. I definitely didn't anticipate having to schedule (a challenge in and of itself) and undergo so many tests and to have to wait, terrified, for each series of events. So far, this has been the hardest and worst part.

Being whisked off is more like what happens if your cancer is localized in the breast and associated lymph node. The big first question was whether the cancer was metastatic or not, which they found out with a CT scan that showed it, first, in my lungs. This was maybe the worst news of the whole thing because it meant that radical options to contain it (mastectomy, radiation) were out and that we had to do a bunch more investigating to figure out where the cells had hidden. There was a worry about my liver which showed a large mass that had been there since 2016 when I'd actually been tested for cancer--thanks to chronic fatigue and consistently elevated white blood cell counts--and come up clean. (Luckily the consensus is that the liver mass is benign since it "grew" only .7cm in 2 years, a possible measurement error.) This left the bone scan, which did show the tracer being absorbed, which led in turn to MRIs and a biopsy to confirm metastasis.

Every time I got a new result I learned that you really have to read the fine print when you wish to be exceptional. All of this is so statistically unlikely...and yet it's true.

All-in-all I had two biopsies of three tumors (breast, lymph node, soft tissue next to the spine), two mammograms, two CT scans, and three MRIs. This is in addition to office visits and blood work. I began working with a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) in Manhattan which brought me back to the city more times than since I left after college. It was looking like the only possible treatment option was single-agent chemo. Most clinical trials for TNBC require that you have been treated first. (I have "de novo" metastatic disease, meaning it had already spread when they first discovered it rather than that it was treated locally but spread anyway.) Others require hormonal receptor positivity. The few I was eligible for were often not enrolling.

However, thanks to the tireless research efforts of my dad, we found out about a clinical trial at the Dana-Farber clinic in Boston that I am potentially eligible to join. It's testing an immunotherapy agent that has already proved effective with TNBC with one chemo agent with a different one. (It actually just got approved by the FDA.) The only trick is that the way the immuno agent works requires that you have a specific protein (PDL1) to really see results. Essentially, one way cancer cells sneak around is switching off your immune system so it can't "see" that they are invaders. The turning off of the immune switch happens with a protein bond involving PDL1; the immuno agent being tested blocks that bond so that the "lights" stay on and the cells can't sneak around as easily. Clever! But if I don't have the protein it's not clear that either being in the trial or getting the now-FDA-approved treatment will benefit me more than single-agent therapy.

So that's the test it's all depending on right now. I should hear in the next couple days. If you want to send positive vibes and wishes and make sacrifices to your god(s) of choice, do it for PDL1 positivity. I feel discouraged, since I've been negative for everything so far, but these are all independent events.

I am also waiting for genetic testing to see if this is a germline mutation--like BRCA--that I inherited. This might affect future treatment and, if I did have one, could be good news because BRCA1 and BRCA2 are very heavily researched...in fact, when I worked in breast cancer research at Wash U Med School I was working with the BRCA lines. (For those who don't know, I started college wanting to go to med school--or at least get a PhD in genetics--so I spent 3 summers between age 16 and 19 studying breast cancer. It's equipped me well to have these discussions, though I certainly imagined being the doctor rather than the patient.)

There are three treatment options that I will (hopefully, hopefully) finalize soon.

I will have the PDL1 protein and will enroll in the clinical trial at Dana-Farber. This will require traveling to Boston every 3 weeks for intensive assessment and new rounds of chemo. The agent involved will make regular life a little rougher since it's by IV and only every 3 weeks. (And I might be in the control group, in which case I'd only be getting the chemo agent. I will, however, know which group I'm in.)

I will have the PDL1 protein and will receive the now-FDA-approved immunotherapy/chemo combination in Princeton with a local doctor and Dana-Farber only doing big-picture stuff.

I will not have the PDL1 protein and will receive single-agent chemo in Princeton, probably orally (twice a day) which is less intensively bad and more low-grade bad all the time. (There is, I guess, a kind of 3b. in which I decide to enroll in the trial even if I don't have PDL1 but it seems less likely.)

So, if you are keeping track of the big decisions that will allow me to actually, finally, begin actively fighting against this that's the last one. I appreciate all the notes that you've been sending so far. I get "message fatigue" but I see all of them and, in fact, have been saving all of them to look back on when things get even harder. So if you'd like to leave love and encouragement here too please know that I will see it and it will be helpful. I'm very unfortunate in this but incredibly fortunate in the number of people I have out there pulling for me and offering support.

Love to you all.

Site link

#personal #medical #health update #not spn #my life as a cancer patient #spn family #YANA #AKF #bex writes

[theblackandwhitespacecadet]

About my GoFund Me Campaign

Update: 22/09/2019

I am a proud Mummy to beautiful Miss Shyloh-Marie & Future Wife to Craig Daniel Van Oosten, A Rare chronic Illness Warrioress...

Excluding Certain area's of my childhood I feel a need to share with my friends what I could never say. Now 35+ year's on, the monster remains, hauntingly near me. I have battled, struggled & lost because of Eating Issues for the majority of my life. But more recently due to factors beyond my control, the choice to eat has no longer become of my volition. My entire GI system is progressively becoming paralysed. The consequences of this are not clear enough to be treated as they are a direct complication of both severe Anorexia leading me through both Cachexia & at times Sarcopenia & a rare condition called Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. Some no'one have guessed Would have anything to do with either conditions. But why? is this, it's because People perceive what that Will, Little is actually Told of the true insurgient truth's, People Don't take the illness Seriously due To how common or fashionable these illness's had become, apparently.... (that's not saying they don't care), they do, their feelings have been tuned out & their frequency has been muffled by their own pain in life. Eating Disorder's have dated back to when whale bones were used as corsage & before bra's were invented & "Eating" & "Disorder" are a poor use of words as the causes have very little to do with actual "Disordered" Eating & everything to do with accepting who we are which is a symptom of a very deep underlying problems with emotional health that have nothing do with eating at all. But what for me came first, the chicken or the egg???? I’ve spent time donateing my body as a guinea pig so to speak for invaluable research to discover a strong correlation with both GI disorders & Anorexia Nervosa, more research is on the way!

I recently was diagnosed with an umbrella of rare & debilitating illnesses Firstly Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, the types have recently been recategorised to help medical teams distinguish between the symptoms loft better as research is being done wherever it can be afforded. However, unfortunately many beautiful people have lost their fight whilst they have tried to seek appropriate treatment & management for this insidious condition.

I have the rare form of two kinds that crossover, an even rarer occurrence of when Vascular type is seen alongside the most common form of classical. Because collagen makes up at least 85% of our bodies in each systemic function of the body all organs, vessels & connective tissue are in effect "Falling apart" these two words have been said to me by many Dr's & yet at the same time they've said do everything you want to do. Do it now before you age more & subsequently lose more ability. Back when I was born so very little was known of Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, my parents cannot be blamed for not knowing about these conditions. Regardless, they just couldn’t have understood my behavioural reactions to the troubles I kept silent, but that has literally torn our family apart on so many levels, we are estranged & this crushes me in ways my existence could never have been imagined.

I have Dysautonomia which causes Gastroparesis & more recently Intestinal Dysmotility & paralysis, where I'm certain my years of anorexic behaviour, due to dreadful emotional trauma had a huge impact on the manifestations of my health.

haven't helped at all & strange in contrast now is the fact that now I want to live, eat & grow my stomach has given up on me & to do so isn't beneficial.

I can however feel hunger, so it's a form of torture. I've also been in CCU for many smaller scale MI's that have lead to being diagnosed with LongQTsyndrome (Brugada) which is frightening, because it is the same type of sudden Arrythmic death syndrome that sports people have been found to suddenly drop on fields from. Lately other conditions that are linked have been exacerbated by Each other genetically. Once the systems of the body are damaged From Starvation & trauma, they then start affecting the genes. Nervous system Starvation leads To Myeln sheath or epithelial Cells To be destroyed because the Complex fatty acids that protect the Nerves are eaten away Once the mitochondria has digested all available sources of fats in the body this then destroys Brain tissue which is fatty acids From Omega 3 amongst other's. As a result of Being starved/neglected as an infant, I developed Anorexia. As a consequence of Anorexia I now have autoimmune disorders, (Lupus) these flare Inflammatory responses to sugars & proteins making it even more difficult to stay reasonably healthy. Collagen cannot be replaced, restored by re-feeding, as I found out the hard way. Anyone That eats can become unwell, These conditions are extremely rare, estimated around 1/500,000 people will be born without the gene to make their own collagen.

Every living thing must consume to survive Life whether they are young, old, thin, gay, or ethnic background.

Ahhh, so that's done for now...

Regardless of what my physical vehicle in this life causes me though, I feel I'm growing stronger in my soul... I don't hold grudges or allow negativity to stop me chasing my dreams, I love theatre (I miss it) & have many similar media skills, a patent called ZeraphicGraphics© Aspirations to touch as many lives with humanity & unconditional love as possible & travel to spend time with the most inspiring people in the world! I love being where the thrill of art in many forms helps people live. My one dream mentor (of almost 20 years) still inspires me today, even more in recent times when with amazement she was cast in a wonderful show on pay TV.

I chose to not allow my illness to be the main focus though, It's hard with a feeding tube not to feel that this is what people see... I feel often that I'm invisable behind the stripes of these conditions. So escape is rather important in the form of Arts!

Update 5/04/2018

Almost a year ago, after being fed by tubes directly into my intestine (after some proper nutrition) I found out I was expecting my miracle baby, Shyloh-Marie... So many turns, twists & tribulations! But we are all alive, grateful & looking forward. Still being a warrior, being a pin cushion like a pro & trying to make things more visible for those like me in the world... We are currently struggling with bubs sleep pattern, but other than that she is more joy than life itself! I have been able to see my now “friend in the theatre” Pamela Rabe at least twice more since our first meeting in Melbourne & I’ve finally found one of the most important people to me from my Carramar year’s... I cannot believe it’s been over 25 years ago that I was a teen, I am very privileged to be able to say this. Maybe, I will write that book! Maybe it will be a best seller lol....

Sarah-Marie Seraphic-McFarlane (Van Oosten)

My darling fiancé is my rock, we are twin flames, we met in a children’s home for adolescents, we have found each other again as we always had hoped might be possible & if possible, we hoped to have healed in the time apart. In these times precious relationships for Craig, were formed & he had a beautiful son as well to a former partner in our time apart. To such pride he was a wonderful dad but sadly, his sweet first born son passed away from a rare condition known as Menkes Disease. Since we have formed our own little family & are wanting to be married next April, we have a fundraiser to help us, as medical cost are exorbitant with my being on peptide pump feeds for nutrition, medication & treatments for a blood disorder yet to be diagnosed officially.

[sm-kchea]

Discussing Digital Citizenship

What is digital citizenship?

Directly from the article, link to article

So there you have it, the most updated textbook-like definition of the subject of digital citizenship. What does it mean though? How are we imposing these norms and responsibilities, on top of empowering the usage of technology? Who are we trying to impost on: kids, adults, elders? 

Ottesen, Julia, on EDSCOOP, Oct 1, 2018

Well, learning how to use technology responsibly has always been a controversy at all ages, from privacy concerns to cyber bullying, imposing norms will always result in someone taking the advice to heart. Anyone should be able to learn digital citizenship, as long technology keeps on advancing and changing, and the necessity of being digitally literate starts to work its way into every walk of life. 

What I would tell someone what digital citizenship is that it is not purely a privacy concern, but almost a web of what to do and say on the internet to ensure the efficiency of what technology has to offer. The 6 curriculum that the edscoop article also discusses are: 

Media balance and well-being

Digital footprint and identity

Privacy and security

Relationships and communication

Digital drama, cyber bullying and hate speech

News and media literacy

Each of these curriculum are constantly changing, like the privacy and security concerns from Facebook had netizens scrambling and demanding Facebook have a delete function. When Facebook made the changes, individuals started making examples showing the masses how to delete and secure their information. This is one very precise example of being able to teach digital citizenship. 

image taken directly from the quiz, link to quiz

The Pew Research Center also has a digital knowledge quiz, to test teens and adults on their digital knowledge of internet safety and general information. 

Digital literacy vs. Digital Citizenship?

Digital literacy and digital citizenship can be very similar, as both rely on individuals willingness to learn about the online world. In literacy there is a part for judgement that has to be made as well, and in citizenship, it focuses very heavily on judging and weighing online experience. Digital literacy also touches more on cognitive skills and a few technical skills as well, while digital citizenship expands more towards basic principles and responsibilities. I think the two correlate well with one another, however digital citizenship seems more likely of the two to teach to wider variety of audiences and ages. Some digital citizenship curriculum, does in fact teach digital literacy as well, so they’re very close-knit. 

Microsoft has a course for digital literacy, that pairs with other functions of being a good digital citizen, link to site

I think the 2018 Gleason & Gillern paper helps show how educators can get involved and foster digital citizenship in classroom settings; whether online at school, home, or anywhere.  They use artifact quotes to help support their claims on how online factors help extend literary skills and increases social benefits, and go on to give examples of how teaching these skills was helping students online.

Gleason, Benjamin, et al., Digital Citizenship with Social Media: Participatory Practices of Teaching and Learning in Secondary Education, Journal of Educational Technology & Society,  International Forum of Educational Technology & Society, 2018

In their twitter examples, they show that many of the students were more engaging socially on public issues. This will eventually lead on to when these teenagers become adults, helping them learn advocacy and passion for their own issues online. This is just the examples for teenagers, we can definitely foster adults/young adults to practice digital citizenship as well. Many of the adults today did not have these types of social platforms about 20-30 years ago, so it is safe to say that some may need some help in digital citizenship as well. 

Taken from Dr. Josie Ahlquist article, link to site

In Ahlquist’s article, she states that the research is still very small in encouraging digital citizenship education within college students, which is why I believe I can make a few suggestions for educators that I have experienced have helped when it came to learning more on digital citizenship. I think with sites like canvas and other college social platforms, courses should advocate digital citizenship through syllabuses or in the case of online courses, should give information and sites to help students do individual research. Campuses could also require short mandatory courses like the ones for sexual assault or alcohol education, since it has students sit down and learn the drawbacks and benefits of their technology. I think it should go over the 9 elements: 

Digital Access

Digital Commerce

Digital Communication and Collaboration

Digital Etiquette

Digital Fluency

Digital Health and Welfare

Digital Law

Digital Rights and Responsibility

Digital Security and Privacy

that appear in Ribble, Baily and Ross’ 2004 article. 

link to article

In order to create a virtual space that will more than likely help people rather than cause destruction, we must make sure that individuals learn how to participate online. By making it more accessible to learn about how to speak online, how to hide privacy and protect your info, how to maintain virtual health, etc., we need to offer more to those who need help learning. It’s important for those who learn to help others online maintain good digital citizenship as well, that it why I think educational creators are essential online participators. 

link to image site

[parkinsonismblr-blog]

prostitution isn’t work

in response to this article:

so the claim here is that prostitution is transactionary. no disagreements there. the question is, what is being bought and sold in this transaction? is it a service? or a product?

Sex work – not that radfems would ever use the phrase – isn’t viewed simply as a commercial transaction but rather, as blood money exchanged for abuse that can only ever happen in a world where women are unequal. That selling sex somehow reduces every woman to a commodity, valued exclusively for the extent to which we’re found fuckable.

is letting a man you dont desire have sex with you “doing work”? if that is the case, then why to prostituted women become less desirable “service providers” as they get older? wouldn’t their experience make them highly sought after, as is seen in other service industries? and if it’s apparently a skill (rather than a surrender of bodily autonomy), then why isn’t it taught in schools? why don’t we teach children about butchers and bakers and prostitutes?

why can’t you get a diploma in prostitution? why doesn’t it need to be taught at all? the job is compared to miners and minimum wage earners but those people need training to learn how to complete the task, prostituted women require no such training because sex is not a skill nor a service, it’s an act of intimacy.

if a man goes to his accountants office and finds his accountant passed out on the floor, he can’t get his taxes done. if a man goes to a prostitute and finds her passed out, he can still do what he came to do, because he doesn’t want a service fulfilled, he wants a body to control and exploit. this transaction isn’t about doing something for your client, it’s about letting him do something to you, which is not the same as providing a service

Radfems love to present testimony of industry “survivors” who were abused as children, have substance abuse problems, mental health calamities, or have experienced bad industry treatment and are now abolitionists. Heavy reliance on such testimony is severely problematic.

As revolting as it is, every industry is full of women who were abused as children. Why? Because the numbers of abused women the world over is deplorable.

Welcome to neoliberalism where presenting evidence and statistics to support an argument is “severely problematic.” Every industry is going to have some proportion of women who were abused as children, but none are as high as they are in prostitution:

Associations between childhood maltreatment and sex work in a cohort of drug-using youth

The prevalence rates for abuse in the sample were 73% for physical abuse; 32.4% for sexual abuse; 86.8% for emotional abuse; 84.5% for physical neglect; and 93% for emotional neglect.

Juvenile Prostitution and Child Sexual Abuse: A Controlled Study

The present study indicates 73% of prostitutes were sexually abused in childhood, compared to 29% of a control group obtained in a random population survey.

Prostitution in Vancouver: violence and the colonization of First Nations women.

Seventy-two percent reported childhood physical abuse, 90% had been physically assaulted in prostitution, 78% had been raped in prostitution. Seventy-two percent met DSM-IV criteria for PTSD. Ninety-five percent said that they wanted to leave prostitution. Eighty-six percent reported current or past homelessness with housing as one of their most urgent needs. Eighty-two percent expressed a need for treatment for drug or alcohol addictions.

Early Developmental Experiences of Female Sex Workers: A Comparative Study                                              

Sex workers described both parents as less caring than did the OWCSA women. They were significantly more likely than the OWCSA women to report childhood sexual abuse. The sex workers were more likely to have left home early, to have become pregnant before the age of 19 years and to not have completed tertiary study.

Adolescent prostitution in Canada and the Philippines

45% of the EX group and 23% of controls had been abused by different assailants on at least two different occasions; assailants were a biological father for 21% of the EX and 4% of the controls. Of the EX, 73%, and 46% of the control group were abused before age 10; 45% of the EX and 2% of the control group had been abused continuously for more than a year; 43% of the EX and 6% of controls had been abused on at least 20 separate occasions. Of the EX, 80%, and 12% of the sexually abused controls had experienced intercourse during the abuse.

Sexual Abuse as a Precursor to Prostitution and Victimization Among Adolescent and Adult Homeless Women

The results suggest that early sexual abuse increases the probability of involvement in prostitution irrespective of any influence exerted through factors such as running away from home, substance abuse, and other deviant activities.

______________________________________________________________

If the sisterhood can support my decision to swallow contraceptive pills or terminate an unwanted pregnancy, then there is a duty for them to support my choice to have as much or as little sex as I like and, if I so choose, put a price tag on that sex.

Decriminalized prostitution, where both purchasing and profiteering off of prostituted women was legalized as well as the act of prostitution itself, has been shown to increase sex trafficking in countries who have implemented it (x x). Many sex-posi feminists argue that this is because of a safer reporting atmosphere that artificially inflates the recorded instances of sex trafficking, however that theory fails to explain why countries who implement the Nordic model, where only the act of prostitution is decriminalized, don’t see a rise in sex trafficking.

We live in a society where every right a citizen has imposes responsibilities on the rest of the citizens in that society; you don’t have the right to exercise your bodily autonomy by punching another woman in the face. You also don’t have the right to exercise your bodily autonomy by helping to perpetuate a cycle of misogynistic abuse that harms literally millions of women and girls all over the planet. You can’t claim that sex work is work and then also claim that selling your body is an individual choice with no externalities; morals aside, that’s not how an economy or an industry works.

Coerced participation, trafficking and lacklustre working conditions are used to pad out the claim that no sex worker has truly chosen their toil. Not only is such an argument predicated on the false-consciousness argument so intoxicating for radfems, but it pretends that sex work is some kind of special case; that sex work shouldn’t exist because there’s certain labour that simply shouldn’t be sold.

Prostitution is not “labour” and purchased sex cannot philosophically be consented to; it is compliant sex, at best.

Point to any industry and there will be examples of bad practices, abused workers, and unsafe conditions.

This is simply not comparable, no other industry has the same risk profile as prostitution in terms of type of harm suffered nor prevalence.

Welcome, my friends, to capitalism. This doesn’t make trafficking or coercion unimportant issues, but equally, it doesn’t make their presence in the sex industry a special case. There are no shortages of industries that need better oversight. But equally, in no other industry where bad practices exist do we ever talk of abolition.

No kind of oversight is ever going to make the sex trade an acceptably   harmless enterprise to women. Bad practices don’t just “exist” in the sex trade, the sex trade is a bad practice. There’s literally no way to make it good. The vast majority of prostituted women are trafficked and coerced, and guess what? If they didn’t exist, the sex trade would collapse because of lack of supply. If only privileged Western camgirls and high class off-street prostitutes existed, which is what non-coerced non-trafficked “sex work” would look like (in theory, statistically even those fully consenting women will experience rape and sexual assault while “working” at some point), there would be a ~90% undersupply. And then what do you think would happen? Would the millionaire profiteers of the sex trade throw up their hands in defeat and walk away from a cheap (or free), easily sourced product that can be sold hundreds of times over? Of course not! The sex trade literally could not survive without rape and exploitation, the same cannot be said for any other industry.

Criminalising an entire industry because of isolated bad examples takes away choice from free-will participants and justifies doing so on the behaviour of abusers. Doing so is victim-blaming and paternalistic.

Under the Nordic model, only buying sex or selling someone elses’ body for sex would be illegal, prostituted women themselves wouldn’t be criminals. Those “isolated bad examples” are the status quo, they’re not rare or exceptional in the slightest. The free will participants of this industry are a minority; implying that the rest of these women are just going to have to suffer so that the privileged minority can do what they want is paternalistic, and saying that women are treated badly in the sex trade because of “isolated examples” and not the underlying dynamics of the industry is victim blaming.

Prostitution and Trafficking in 9 Countries: Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.

We interviewed 854 people currently or recently in prostitution in 9 countries (Canada, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, United States, and Zambia), inquiring about current and lifetime history of sexual and physical violence. We found that prostitution was multitraumatic: 71% were physically assaulted in prostitution; 63% were raped; 89% of these respondents wanted to escape prostitution, but did not have other options for survival. 75% had been homeless at some point in their lives; 68% met criteria for PTSD. Severity of PTSD symptoms was strongly associated with the number of different types of lifetime sexual and physical violence. Our findings contradict common myths about prostitution: the assumption that street prostitution is the worst type of prostitution, that prostitution of men and boys is different from prostitution of women and girls, that most of those in prostitution freely consent to it, that most people are in prostitution because of drug addiction, that prostitution is qualitatively different from trafficking, and that legalizing or decriminalizing prostitution would decrease its harm.

_____________________________________________________________

In the radfem imagination, for the selling of sex to be understood as so very horrible sex is understood as having special properties; that it can never just be labour like any other, seemingly because no other job necessitates so much cock.

First of all, the aggressive cock talk doesn’t do much to combat the perception that critiques of radical feminism are often underpinned by lesbophobia. Doctors look at cocks all the time as a part of their professional occupation, and radfems don’t object to that, because a service is being performed in that context and neither party is harmed, nor do they receive sexual gratification.

Radfems apparently find it inconceivable that women could actually chose to have contact with a penis they’re not in love with. That having random-cock-contact could actually be found fun or lucrative or even a preferable use of one’s workday than toil in a factory, a lecture theatre or a coal mine.

Casual sex is a pretty common thing and it’s not exclusive to the sex trade. The choice to enter the sex trade (a choice made be very few participants) frankly is often underpinned by a history of sexual abuse (as evidenced earlier) and associated with certain psychiatric disorders (x x, the pattern of causation is tricky but either direction supports radical feminist theory) even in wealthy “developed” countries like the United States.

Aside from that, purchased sex cannot be consented to because it’s sex you wouldn’t be having if you weren’t getting paid (you might be having sex with someone but not with that specific individual), not to mention that the whole “selling a service” argument kind of falls apart if you also claim that the sex you’re selling is consensual. If you’re selling a service, the receiver of the service decides on the circumstances of that service fulfillment.

Such views aren’t grounded in women’s lived experiences. They fail to recognise that quite a few of us not only really like the cock, but that having contact with it doesn’t necessitate “giving ourselves away”. Instead, they rely on a moralistic opposition to any sex that’s had in quantities greater than every second Tuesday.

The quantity of sex is not the objection, and the implication that sex always involves cocks is interesting. In any case, you can enjoy as much cock as you want without prostituting yourself, this seams like a false equivalency.

And they use terms like “sell herself” as though, at the end of the transaction, a woman has sold off a body part. Cue Catholic school metaphors about virginity loss.

I suppose “rent herself” makes more sense but it doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

My worth isn’t determined by how much sex I’ve had. Equally, having sex for money doesn’t change me as a person any more than teaching for money or writing for money does: we each sell our time – our labour – to the market

And yet somehow people who teach for money don’t experience far higher rates of PTSD than the general population

Sex work isn’t an industry you have to love, nor is it an industry you have to find empowering. But love and empowerment aren’t things we ever expect of any other industry either. The sex industry doesn’t need your admiration, but nor does it deserve your condemnation.

Any industry that relies on the suffering of women and girls to servive deserves the condemnation of feminists. This is not a difficult concept to understand.

[nakshpatel4569-blog]

25 Resume writing tips which will help you to land your dream job.

Having a well-crafted resume can be the key for getting your dream job. But figuring out how to craft resume that increase your chances to be getting hired among other candidates?

Well search no more, we have compiled all resume tips over here which will lead you land your dream job.

Tailor your resume before every job you apply for

Read and understand the job description thoroughly and highlight the skills, company requirements, and anything that relates with your experience in your resume needed in the job.

Open yourself to various applications

Don't reject the applications if you can't fulfil all the skills they are looking for. Companies know there's no candidate with ALL the skills and characteristics they want. Besides, they also get tons of applications from total beginners.

So what’s wrong with lacking one or two skills they’re asking for? Nothing, so don’t let it stop you. It all comes down to how valuable you can be to their team, based on your resume.

Choosing the best resume introduction / objective

How you begin your resume depends on several factors. These includes:

What industry you’re part of

What stage your career is in

You’re entering in the field or established in the field

You’re in the midst of career change

Keep these items in mind when writing a resume introduction

Tailor it to the position:

Instead of writing general objective, tailor it specifically for the job you’re applying for. Start by mentioning the job description and highlights the skills or requirements that aligns you to the job role. When you include an objective specific to job role, the recruiter is likely to dig deeper in the resume.

Lead with your strongest attributes: Write the strengths relevant to the job role and also share the attributes which you’re proud of. For example, “Dedicated and experienced,” “Accomplished leader,” or  “Organized and driven”

Describe how you’ll add values to the organization: Managers and employers wants to know how you can add values to their organization. Mentioning values you can add to the organization increases your chances of getting hired with compare to other candidates having same skills and experience.

Where to put the education section in your resume

The two best places for your education section are:

Before your experience section – If you’ve just graduated, consider putting your education section before your experience section because you probably have more educational background than work experience at this point of time.

After your experience section – If you’re established professional, consider putting your work experience before your education because hiring manager or employer will find your work experience much more relevant at this point in your career.

Keep it Recent and Relevant

Only show the most recent and relevant job titles you’ve held. Remove job titles irrelevant to your current professional goals. This frees up space to boost your skills, achievements, or certifications.

Include job relevant certification and awards

Adding job relevant certification and awards, can potentially help you to make your application more convincing. Here are a few examples:

Certifications

Publications

Professional Memberships

Awards & Recognitions

Create a separate section as well to put volunteer work which you have done.

Achievement oriented

Adding achievements to your experience section is one of the best things you can do for your resume. Use method called ‘PAR’ which stands for problem, action and results.

Problem: Identify a responsibility or issue at the workplace

Action: Discuss how you were able to address this problem

Results: What was the outcome of the actions you took?

It gives recruiters a tangible sense of how you use your skills to get results.

Check out the sample: To increase the profit, I implemented reselling strategy for the services we provide, resulting in a 15% increase of profit.

Using digits in the accomplishments

Digits usually stand out in the sea of text as it makes it catchier. Using digits to mention your accomplishments should be put in the start of the sentence.

For example: 20% increase in ROI, by optimizing and automating the email marketing

Try to create curiosity by making the recruiters taking interest in you and hence they will call you.

Make sure the first three words are highlighted and emphasized to make an impression

The first three words and last three words recruiter remembers the most in headlines. Use numbers, results, or power words to make your first three words count.

Don’t write the full life story

Resumes are usually are small and relevant to the job requirement rather than being telling the whole life story. Think it is as an abstract of your present career and potential future.

Avoid writing generic skills

As we know there are two types of skills soft skills and hard skills. It is usually avoided to write the soft skills such as interaction, critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork etc. The reason to it is because these isn’t the necessary tools for a job.

Choose to add your social media links wisely

Any other link apart from LinkedIn is not suggested to add in the resume. However in certain circumstances, linking your social media links can apply your application.

Resume Formatting Tips

Reverse Chronological order

Start your professional history with your current or previous job. Don’t hide your employments using a functional resume, unless you have a long job gap or a similar situation that necessitates it.

Appropriate fonts size

It is usually advised to use the same font size everywhere but you can change the font size especially in the header section or in the main important fields like education, experience and hobbies and interests.

If in doubt use:

Font size 12 is standard

Arial and Times New Roman are the recommended fonts to use

Use caps

Caps are essential part on giving out an emphasis. But do not use the caps on the sentence that might sound controversy.

Length of resume

Limit your resume to two pages. Any more than that and you run the risk of some pages not getting the attention it deserves.

Work on your grammar

Avoid using pronouns especially the personal pronouns like I, me, myself, etc. Usually these pronouns are not used in a resume because the whole resume is talking about yourself.

Application Tracking Software

Many large corporations now use ATS software to sort through the thousands of applications they receive on a regular basis. These systems search for keywords and key phrases relevant to the position they’re hiring for and filter out applicants who did not use the correct vocabulary.

Don’t Use Your College Email

Regarding resume tips for college students: It’s best to avoid using your university email account, especially if you’re about to graduate. Some schools will mercilessly delete your account when you leave – leaving any job related communications you had there gone with the wind.

Proofread and then proofread again.

Even the most confident writer is not immune to typos. Once you’ve finished writing, double-check, and then triple-check your resume for small errors. Ideally, ask a friend to proofread it too in order to provide a second set of eyes.

Save Your Resume as a PDF

While most people just attach their resume to their emails in a .doc format, it’s worth attaching it as a PDF file as well. PDFs retain their formatting regardless of how they are viewed, so they’re your best bet when sending your application out electronically.

Search and apply for the jobs

Search for the job online on Taskiy.net (www.taskiy.net). Taskiy.net allows you to search for the jobs by Title, category, keyword, location and even companies. Thousands of jobs from all over the world are updated on everyday be sure to check frequently.

Include a cover letter in your email

Cover letters are an essential accompaniment to your resume because they provide hiring managers with insight into how your experience matches their requirements. For consistency, try writing a cover letter template that aesthetically complements your resume. We have a cover letter writing strategies as well as cover letter tips if you’re ready to explore at this stage.

Remember to attach all documents in an email

It is nothing more embarrassing then sending an email to hiring manager twice because you forgot to attach all documents in the first email.

Double check the mail body, recipient name, recipient email address, attachments, subject line before sending off any email for the job application.

Last but not Least… Follow Up!

These days it’s expected that you’ll follow up your application with an email or phone call, not just to confirm whether the employer received your application, but also to ask if they had any questions and express your desire to discuss the job in person.

By calling or emailing after sending your resume you are indicating persistence, diligence, and a strong desire to be their number one candidate.

#job #jobs #jobsearch #jobsearchengine #jobplatform

[tazusher-blog]

Mind out, Mum!

There’s no time more necessary than now to share our techno-wisdom with our elders. 

It is no doubt that at one time in your life you have had to show a parent or grandparent how to use a piece of technology. That might have been showing them how to take a photo, send an email, or even turn the computer on. Whatever the action, it is also most likely that you will have chuckled to yourself at the time; stopping to question how the simplest of actions could appear so complex to these people. Especially to those who once taught us to read, write and ride a bike.

Having been brought up in an age dominated by digital technology, it is hard to imagine how using such devices as smart phones and laptops comes unnaturally to some. In fact, if you asked your parents or grandparents, you’d definitely be shocked to learn the age at which they got their first mobile, when they sent their first email, and at what point their family owned a fully-functioning TV. Chances are, their responses will most definitely not fall within the first 13 years of their lives; an answer which is likely to come from only our current generation. Nonetheless, owing to the ever-growing influence of modern day technology, it is no surprise that more and more members of the older generation are turning to high-tech devices for the simple purpose of keeping up with the world. Yes, grandparents are still able to visit their local corner shop for a copy of the newspaper each day, or call up the number of the catalogue they want to buy a new winter coat from, but there are still so many advantages to be gained from having access to the internet. These include the use of Google, online shopping, and catch up TV; all of which my very own grandparents have gained access to following their recent purchase of an iPad.

So where do we step in?

Unlike us who will receive our shining new iPhone upgrade and have our devices set up and ready to go within an hour of receiving the phone, those who aren’t accustomed to using such devices will struggle to know where to start. And yes, there is that 1000-page document that comes with the device to tell you how to work it, but when you have no idea what you’re looking at to start with, even just getting the gadget to work can be a mission.

As a tech-savvy and knowledgeable generation, it is our responsibility to be there for our parents and grandparents; to show them the ropes and help them keep up with the world. I, for one, am frequently bombarded by questions from my parents about what updates on their phones mean, or how to email our auntie the latest photos of our family holiday. Equally, it is our role to warn our parents about the dangers of the internet by showing them how to protect their information online, and how not to be fooled by those on the prowl for such clueless victims.

(Yes, my grandparents are this cute.)

Surveillance Capitalism

One of the most pervasive elements of our online activity is the occurrence of surveillance capitalism. This is when the puppeteers of the internet take control of everything that we do online by converting our personal data into something useful and profitable to them. And it’s all out of our control.

Take Google for example. Google is a marvellous platform which allows us to ask almost ANYTHING and receive an answer within seconds of our search. We can ask Google how to change a tire on our car, what time the nearest Nando’s closes, or where to buy the best value top-of-the range makeup. Whatever our search, Google has an answer. And he’s happy to help at no charge. Well, that’s what we think…

Google is in fact, watching our every move. Absorbing our every click into its data base and sharing this information to its many friends; Facebook, Instagram and Amazon. And what do they do with this info? They use it to create targeted advertising tailored to our searches. Presenting us with adverts to help us find that perfect coat we were searching for two days ago, and tempting us with content that is personal and applicable to us.

Where’s the danger in that?

Whilst there are many of us who are aware of the internet’s tactful tricks, our parents and grandparents are less sensitive to this. And this is where things might get sticky. Take my mum for example, she on a day to day basis messages me with links to products she’s “seen on Facebook”, asking me to purchase them for her. Some of these products are often the most random of things; pillow case covers, ring polishers, and magnet eyelash extensions. Things I certainly wouldn’t come across on my news feeds. When asking her about the unusual eyelash extensions, I discovered that the previous week she had actually googled ‘the best mascaras for lengthening lashes”: and this is where I was able to make the link. The sites had worked together by exchanging this data, and their objective (to target my mum with a product which offered an expensive solution to her search) had ultimately succeeded!

However, this is a very minor example and it could be argued that it was my mum’s choice to buy the item. And that she easily could have turned her head if it was something she didn’t want to buy. On the other hand, there are also adverts which promote slightly fraudulent deals such as ‘Buy XXXXX for £0, limited time only’, which actuals totals at £20 once an extortionate delivery price has been added at the checkout (and you’ve already put your card details in...).

Elsewhere on the internet, there are also much more extreme examples of fraudulent and manipulative behaviour. Phishing being the major method of attack. Phishing is defined by the Oxford dictionary as “The fraudulent practice of sending emails purporting to be from reputable companies in order to induce individuals to reveal personal information, such as passwords and credit card numbers.”. It is an act which forces users of the internet to become victims of their own devices, and can result in serious consequences such as losing money, being hacked, or having your identity stolen.

As with the other online trickeries mentioned above, phishing is another example of the need for us to educate our elders about such online crime. Just like cold-callers and scammers who use telephone calls to target vulnerable people, phishing is another, and arguably easier way, for criminals to benefit from the naivety of their victims at the click of a button.

How does it work?

Phishing usually occurs in the form of emails claiming to be sent from trustworthy sources such as your bank, ‘fake’ colleagues, or PayPal. Some might also occur in the form of Holiday agents claiming that you need to enter your card details to re-secure your recent holiday payment. In reality, after giving into this email, you won’t be able to afford that holiday you were saving for!

 Whoever the sender, their goal is to persuade you to give them something valuable to them; that being your passwords, credit card details, or personal information.

What to look out for:

Before you can warn others about the danger of online crimes, it is important to know yourself what to look out for. The main things to seek out are:

Who is sending the email?

Do you actually know the person? If so, do they email like they normally would? How do they sign off the email?

 If it’s from a bank or company, do you actually have an account with them? And is what they are referring to something actually relevant to you?

Is the email legitimate?

The first thing I do when receiving a suspected spam email is to click on the name of the sender and view the entire email address. This way I can see whether it’s likely to be an official account or not. If it doesn’t even mention the name of the sender, it’s likely it’s not.

Are they likely to EMAIL you about this?

When receiving an email about your latest bank transaction, or prompting you to verify your Paypal details, it’s also wise to ask yourself: would they actually email me about this? Or would they rather send me a letter in the post or give me a call? Legitimate emails from companies should never ask you to do something involving such confidential data at the click of a button. 

Also, don’t allow yourself to be fooled by your inbox. Even if an email hasn’t been sent to your Junk folder, this doesn’t mean that it’s as true as it claims to be. Highest chances are, it’s only made its way through the spam checks because the sender knows what s/he’s doing.

If there’s anything that the hundreds of E-safety lessons at secondary school taught me, it’s to think extra-cautiously about everything I do and engage with online. It’s now time to share this wisdom with those who might be slightly less aware. Don’t be dumb, tell mum!

Image credits:

https://gfycat.com/fortunatesmartgreyhounddog

https://smith.queensu.ca/insight/articles/don_t_buy_what_surveillance_capitalism_is_selling

https://tech.rochester.edu/security/phishing-education/

#phishing #esafety #digitalage #surveillancecapitalism