on the one hand ppl are very weird abt height and gender and power and conflating all three and it’s very not good, like, needing men to be tall sux and needing women to be small sux and the entire idea of tallness as natural eternal protector and smallness as natural eternal protectee is like. :/
on the other hand the other day when ppl were talking abt height on here it really was like ‘oh they’d be taller than me… ’ so like. guess i live in a society with social conditioning 2 which i am not in fact immune… :/
Not to sound like a 90s shallow prep, but how you dress can affect your self esteem, and putting energy into wearing things you actively like and projecting an ideal of yourself through fashion instead of seeing clothes as things you have to put on out of obligation helps.
It also can give you a sense of control over your appearance that you otherwise wouldn’t have lmao
I bought a cape because of this
this post is written in a humorous tone but this is the realest shit.
two years ago i wore baggy sweatpants and flip flops every day because i was depressed but then decided eh to hell with it and bought some black edgy emo clothes bc thats how i always wanted to dress but never got a chance to and it was only then that i realized that the sweatpants flip flops look was just keeping me in my depression funk. i didnt like the way i looked and i didnt identify with the clothes i was wearing and it only made me feel worse.
i then went through my entire wardrobe and got rid of everything that made me feel that way.
now i have multiple outfit possibilities requiring different levels of effort but on days where putting on clothes just seems like a project i just have to put on black jeans and a band t-shirt and i can still feel good about the way i look which is a really good way to start off my day.
i can not recommend this approach to clothing enough.
Can I just say this is the healthiest mindset related post I have seen on this sight and I want every single person on here to read this
Also let me just say because I’ve encountered it a lot—people who try to sneakily put you down by implying that you’re overdressed/a “try-hard”/somehow insecure because you put effort into what you wear could probably stand to try a little harder at finding small things they can do for themselves, like getting dressed each morning, that spark joy… because that’s a pretty freaking joyless takeaway from seeing someone in a cool outfit.
Don’t be a dick in bookmarks, folks. And yes while I made this image, I’m giving free reign. Take it. Spread it far and wide. Because I’m hearing that some readers don’t know that their bookmarks are visible.
All these HD gifsets of No Way Home are making me want to work on Maggie and Daisy (not that I would ever complain about that) while at the same time shattering my goddamn heart
did they like..steal them in the dead of night or something? there’s no way anyone could get away with that during the daytime without the hens creating a huge ruckus…
We keep joking about Five now being so tall but I’d just like to say we are all lucky cause Aidan is the perfect Five and if him being a growing boi is the price then I happily pay it
I don’t how you guys get into new pairings/ships, but I usually see a couple of posts or gifs about them here and say “Yeah, I ain’t gonna be sucked into that” then I black out and suddenly is one month later and there’re like 50 new fics in my AO3 bookmarks
THIS, or then I get obsessed with an actress and I somehow end up searching AO3 for every character she’s played.
To Turn One’s Eyes Inside Out, 1970, a photograph of Penone wearing mirrored contact lenses, continues this notion of reversal. Instead of receiving images from outside for later transformation into art, the artist’s eyes become screens on which to display an immediate picture of the world.
I feel like I should be clear lol: I don’t ship Felix and Allegra, so anything I draw of them is not ship art, and I will not be drawing them in that context because I see them as close childhood friends. I’ll still be drawing them because I adore this duo, but yea. ‘fraid you’ll have to ask someone else for that, k
I’m trying to finish the bookkeeping course that I started this time last year and then.. spent the majority of the year being unable to absorb any of it and like.. I forgot how much my hands cramp up after literally 5 minutes of writing anything down. I took two days break and they’re still complaining after a couple minutes. like can you not. If anyones wondering, my brain refuses to absorb new info like this just from reading so I need to physically write things down, only I’ve never been able to take notes so I just rewrite everything I read. My method of studying as a child was rereading the chapter the night before the test and hoping my brain would cooperate to recall it instead of random useless things from the previous test that I didn’t need now. saying that now, i think reading it from the physical book helps more than from a computer screen but i dont have a physical copy of this bookkeeping book.
RewatchingBoy (2010) for the first time in a long time and I keep having to pause it to emotionally recover. Like there’s something about a tragedy(ish?) that’s kind of camouflaged with comedy. Idk. Like it’s from Boy’s pov so he doesn’t see anything wrong with his life but when you’re an adult watching, it’s like a horror movie about child neglect. Like even though I’ve seen it before I’m still like OH NO OH NO OH NO I want to crawl through the screen and make these kids dinner.
I’ve seen five different authors take down, or prepare to take down, their posted works on Ao3 this week. At the same time, I’ve seen several people wishing there was more new content to read. I’ve also seen countless posts by authors begging for people to leave comments and kudos.
People tell me I am a big name fan in my chosen fandom. I don’t quite get that but for the purposes of this post, let’s roll with it. On my latest one shot, less than 18% of the people who read it bothered to hit the kudos button. Sure, okay, maybe that one sort of sucked. Let’s look at the one shot posted before that - less than 16% left kudos. Before that - 10%, and then 16%. I’m not even going to get into the comments. Let’s just say the numbers drop a lot. I’m just looking at one shots here so we don’t have to worry about multiple hits from multiple chapters, people reading previous chapters over, etc. And if I am a BNF, that means other people are getting significantly less kudos and comments.
Fandom is withering away because it feels like people don’t care about the works that are posted. Why should I go to the trouble of posting my stories if no one reads them, and of the people who do read them, less than a fifth like them? Even if you are not a huge fan of the story, if it kept your attention long enough for you to get to the bottom, go ahead and mash that kudos button. It’s a drop of encouragement in a big desert.
TL;DR: Passively devouring content is killing fandom.
Reblogging again
So much this
You know, kudos and comments are much beloved by all esp. yrs truly, but I have to say: I’ve been posting fic for 20 years, and I have never in my entire life had a story stay above a 1:9 kudos to hits ratio (or comments to hits, back when kudo wasn’t an option). Usually they don’t stay above 1:10, once they’ve been around for a few weeks.
I also have a working background in online marketing. In social media 1:10 is what you would call a solid engagement score, when people actually care about your product (as opposed to “liking” your Facebook page so they could join a contest or whatever). If BNFs are getting 1:5 - and I do sometimes see it - that is sky-high engagement. Take any celebrity; take Harry Styles, who has just under 30M followers and doesn’t tweet all that often. He regularly gets 3-400K likes, 1-200K retweets. I’ve seen him get up to just under 1M likes on a tweet. That’s a 1:30 engagement ratio, for Harry Styles, and though some of you guys enjoy my fics and have said so, I don’t think you have as lasting a relationship with my stories as Harry Styles’s fans do with him. XD;
Again, this is not to say we, as readers, should all go home and not bother to kudo or comment or engage with fic writers. That definitely is a recipe for discouraging what you want to see in future. But this is not the first post I’ve seen that suggests a 20% kudo ratio is the equivalent of yelling into the void, and I’m worried that we as writers are discouraging ourselves because our expectations are out of whack.
I think about this a lot, because it’s important to know what a realistic goal to expect from an audience is, even though I admit it definitely is kind of depressing when you look at the numbers. I was doing reading on what sort of money you can expect to make from a successful webcomic, and the general rule of thumb seems to be that if your merchandising is meshing well with your audience, about 1% will give you merch. I imagine ‘subscribe to patreon’ also falls in this general range.
Stuff that is ONLY available for dollars are obviously going to have a different way of measuring this, but when it comes to ‘If people can consume something without engaging back in any fashion (hitting a like button, buying something, leaving a comment)’ the vast majority will.
And as a creator that is frustrating but as a consumer it’s pretty easy to see how it happens. I have gotten steadily worse at even liking posts, much less leaving comments on ones I enjoy, since I started using tumblr. It’s very difficult to engage consistently. I always kudo on any fanfic I read and comment on the vast majority, but then again I don’t read a lot of fanfic, if you are someone who browses AO3 constantly/regularly for months or years, I could see how it’s easy to stop engaging. I don’t remember to like every YT video or tumblr fanart I see, much less comment on them.
When we are constantly consuming free content it’s hard to remember to engage with it or what that engagement means to the creators. And lol, honestly that sucks. Certainly as consumers we should be better about it. But also like, as a creator be kinder to yourself by setting a realistic bar of what you can achieve.
And IMO, if numbers matter to you (kudos, comments, etc) be honest about the fact that you CAN improve those things by marketing yourself better. The ‘I just produced my art and put it out there and got insanely popular because it was just so brilliant’ is less than a one a million chance. Lots of amazing content is overlooked every day because there is a lot of good content and a metric fuckton of mediocre to bad content. You can only SORT of judge the quality of your work based on the audience it generates, but if what you WANT is an audience there is way, way, WAY more you can be doing than simply producing whatever you immediately feel like. Marketing yourself is a skill and if you want the benefits of it you have to practice it.
I have a professional background in internet marketing as my day job and a moderate hobby business. My definition for “moderate” is “it pays for itself, keeps me in product, and occasionally buys groceries.”
In the day job, which is for an extremely large global company, there are entire teams of people whose entire purpose of employment is to ensure a 3% conversion rate. That’s it. That is for a Fortune 100 company: the success metric is for 3% of all visitors to a marketing web site to click the “send me more info” link.
My moderate business that pays for itself has a 0.94% conversion rate of views to orders. Less than 1%, and it’s still worth its time – and this is without me bothering to do any marketing beyond instagram and tumblr posts with new product.
I know it feels like no one is paying attention to you and you’re wasting your time if you don’t get everyone clicking kudos or commenting but I promise, I PROMISE, you are doing fantastically, amazingly well with your 10% rate. You probably aren’t going to go viral AND THAT’S FINE. You’re only hurting yourself if you’re expecting a greater return – don’t call yourself a failure, because you’re NOT. You’re just looking at it the wrong way. I promise, you’re lovely just the way you are.
Reblogging this bc it is a take on fan engagement at AO3 that I haven’t seen before, and as a writer I find it helpful to have this reality check. Also I wonder which came first: the overall low engagement rates in internet commerce, or the freaking shit-ton of unwanted spam and advertising we’re constantly bombarded with?
I think as writers our assumption (my assumption anyway) is that the portion of hits that don’t convert to kudos equals the portion of readers who looked at your fic, didn’t like it, and never finished it. But it would seem that is an overly pessimistic assumption.
I should know this, because I ‘like’ very sparingly here and reblog only less sparingly, and yet I read and enjoy a lot of posts I don’t like or reblog.
Also, while I will always defend people’s right to take down their work if they want to, I will point out that taking your work down simply because you think it didn’t get enough engagement prevents you from having the experience of seeing it slowly grow over time. You’re doing the equivalent of cancelling a TV show that doesn’t have an amazingly successful pilot episode, without waiting to see if it gains a devoted following by mid-season. It’s short-sighted. It means you’re not going to potentially have the pleasure of someone commenting on it 5 or 10 years later to explain that it was their favourite story, that they re-read it 20 times, that they shared it with their friends, or even just that they’re so glad they found it on that specific day, years after you posted it. You might not even have the pleasure of going back to re-read it yourself and see how you’ve progressed as a writer.
AO3 is an archive - it’s there to preserve fanfic. It has longevity, and if you leave your works there, they can have longevity too. And you never know when something is going to be rediscovered, or who it might mean something to (including yourself).
Due to RL shenanigans, and my brain not working correctly, the last piece of fanfic I published was probably about five years ago? But it is still such a pleasure to get a random kudos from someone in my inbox, sometimes for stuff I wrote at the turn of the century!
The point about people rereading stories they love, or calling the link back up on their web browser to send to a friend, is really key here. If I find myself going back to a story again and again and getting the “you have already left kudos here” message, I try to at least leave a little comment to tell them that it is a favorite.
But yeah, 1:10 engagement is super freaking good for any kind of web content. So yes, as a reader, leave your kudos and comment whenever you can, but also remind yourself as a writer to keep your expectations within the realm of likelihood.
