"You will never get a fan to care more about clothes, cars, shoes, or household products than they do about whether Sterek is going to happen on Teen Wolf."
~ Why Yahoo can buy Tumblr, but it can’t buy Fandom The unspoken truth behind Yahoo’s much-touted bid to court Tumblr’s younger demographic is that for all intents and purposes, Tumblr culture is fandom culture. There are still plenty of other spaces where fandom exists, but we have never had such a megalithic and central social platform so visibly united under one umbrella. … Even as Yahoo insists nothing will change, business analysts and media experts are speculating that the company intends to plumb Tumblr for its advertising potential. But if that’s the case, Yahoo should know that when you market to fandom, you have to adopt a whole new way of thinking about marketing, brand advertising, and consumer loyalty. [READ MORE] (please read this article omg i have never wanted to *drop mic* until this day) (via dailydot) Aja’s post should be required reading for anyone doing brand management anywhere outside of Facebook. That said… … this article is about some of the more evolutionarily mature fandoms and not the less organized ones. There are still plenty of ways that this can (and probably will) go wrong for those fan communities and for that bad behavior to infect other fandoms. But there are also ways that this can (and hopefully will) go very very right. (via kenyatta) There are a lot of pieces of my life intersecting here. 
“I think a lot about what makes a strong female character. You know, movies and TV shows, these things have influence, my own website. So I think the question of “What makes a strong female character?”, often goes misinterpreted. And instead we get these two-dimensional superwomen, who maybe have one quality that’s played up a lot. Like, you know, a Catwoman type, or she plays her sexuality up a lot and it’s seen as power. But they’re not strong characters who happen to be female, they’re completely flat and they’re basically cardboard characters.
The problem with this is that then people expect women to be that easy to understand, and women are mad at themselves for not being that simple. When in actuality, women are complicated. Women are multifaceted. Not because women are crazy, but because people are crazy. And women happen to be people!”-Tavi Gevinson for TEDTalks [x]
Tavi Gevinson for President.
(Source: dohertypeter, via inaneenglish)
With all of the Yahoo-Tumblr reporting still going on right now it surprises me how many writers still mistake Tumblr for a “blogging platform.”
Anyone who has spent significant time on Tumblr knows that this whole “blog” thing is a front.
Literally.
70% of a given blog’s post traffic actually happens in the Dashboard. For some blogs, that percentage is even higher.
This makes things like ranking a Tumblr blog’s popularity through site traffic fairly dubious.
It also means that the value of Tumblr isn’t just in the original posts but the amplification of ideas through reblogs and the like.
There’s probably an iceberg.gif of some sort that would work really well here.
(btw, the numbers in that image are from an “official” blog that I run, not my personal blog.)
def one of those days I want kenyatta to run the world.
55,500 POUNDS OF FOOD!?
With one month left on the tour, and I would like to say a HUGE THANK YOU to all 1300 of you who have volunteered your time with us at food banks and food drives across America.
Our little arms combined have re-packed and distributed 55,500 pounds of food to our North American neighbors - equivalent to 46,250 meals!
We have volunteered in 12 cities so far, and have collected 2,150 pounds of donations. The enthusiasm and effort has been a wonderful sight to see. Also, a big shout-out to Mandy Hort for organizing continual Hartosexual volunteer events since we’ve left the Oregon Food Bank. That’s dope!
Thanks for being a part of this, guys. Feels mighty good.
Love,
Hannah
I am ridiculously proud of Hannah for everything she’s managed to accomplish in the last six months. When she sets her mind to something she moves mountains.
13% of internet users ages 18-29 use Tumblr.
Compare Tumblr user demographics to other social networking sites: http://pewrsr.ch/VBAYby
The reveal: Tumblr has the smallest percentage of any 18-29 year old demo listed!
(via unionmetrics)
"Instead of robust public education, we have Mr. Zuckerberg’s “rescue” of Newark’s schools. Instead of a vibrant literary culture, we have Oprah’s book club. Instead of investments in public health, we have the Gates Foundation. Celebrities either buy institutions, or “disrupt” them."
~ George Packer on “Celebrating Inequality.” A sobering read. (via thoughtyoushouldseethis)
You can change the direction this train is moving just by thinking about it.
Is this the new ‘which way is the lady rotating?’ brain test?
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
So I was loaned this book by someone with, apparently, the exact same taste in books as me (I mean, not really, but his is SUPER CLOSE). Because, okay, it’s sci fi—time travel sci fi—by a British lady, and it’s basically… a P. G. Wodehouse novel. Except with an unbelievably good plot.
Like. Even if it was terrible, jesus christ, what a fucking gorgeous concept. And it wasn’t terrible! It was AMAZING! I can’t believe I hadn’t ever read it before—it was very Diana Wynne Jones-y; seriously, she almost could have written it.
I love this book a whole lot.
Number 1 recommendation when people ask for new readables.
I’m fascinated by the addition of wood chips (or bark bits, tree shreds, whatever they might be called) to the short stretch of Logan Boulevard greenspace that plays host to the Logan Square Farmers’s Market on Sundays. I can’t stop thinking about trails.
The little reading I’ve done on the history of Logan Square reveals an emphasis on the role of Milwaukee and Elston Avenues as commercial conduits that grew from so-called Indian trails. In the mid-nineteenth century these routes were paved with wood, becoming the plank roads that ferried goods into the emerging Chicago metropolis (in this case the North West Plank Road). The plank roads were reported to be notoriously dangerous, the wood rotting after only a few seasons of traffic. As the story goes, they were upgraded to more durable surfaces, then came the railways, expressways, and airways (if you take account for the endless chain of flights between O’Hare and New York). These arrived in sequence, all along the same northwesterly corridor.
Logan Boulevard itself is part of, or was incorporated into, the (awe-inspiringly grand) ‘Emerald Necklace’ designed by Daniel Burnham for the master plan of Chicago. The wide boulevards with flanking streets and wide medians are a beautiful vision of never-quite-realized urban ideals. Walking around at twilight I can sometimes glimpse the ghostly image of a phaeton on its leisurely weekend ride. One of these days I want to bike every extant (and unrealized/non-extant) yard of the boulevards, camera (and maybe voice recorder?) in hand.
Today we have the phenomenon of the farmer’s market. What I’m fixated on is the idea of recursivity. The market pops up every weekend (late May to October) at the juncture of Logan Boulevard and Milwaukee Avenue, the meeting place of these two historical threads. If the farmer’s market creedo is about (re)introducing local produce and goods into urban markets (or, alternatively, food deserts), then the use of Logan Boulevard’s wide greenspace is an imaginative hack of Burnham’s plan, a creative subterfuge of early twentieth-century notions of leisure. It also loops back to the former uses of Milwaukee Avenue as a route for the transport of local goods.
But beyond that I see something poetic in the foot-worn trail that kills the short green grass. The footsteps of market goers who’s flip-flops and strollers tame the manicured lawns of master plan-Chicago. One hundred years of concrete and iron infrastructure peeled away to the sinews of (so-called Indian) trails. While I adore the idea or recursivity, there is something more tangible at play, and the addition of wood chips seems to make it all the more real.
I love it when my brother blogs.
"How fragile we are, between the few good moments."
~ Jane Hirshfield, “Vinegar and Oil” (via commovente)
(via nogreatillusion)
"I have always told them not to worry, but the truth is I carry a “faulty” gene, BRCA1, which sharply increases my risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer.
My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman.
Only a fraction of breast cancers result from an inherited gene mutation. Those with a defect in BRCA1 have a 65 percent risk of getting it, on average.
Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy.
"
~ My Medical Choice - NYTimes.com Angelina Jolie is BRCA-1 positive. I’ve been adjacent to this world for a couple of years now. My father tested positive for the gene mutation, and told my sister and I we needed to be tested. I was negative. But Dana tested positive. She elected to have the surgeries. They were long and torturous but she’s come through the other side. She now does a lot of work with the advocacy group FORCE. My father also does work with them, fundraising and about genealogical research. The thing you need to know, that is of the essence, is that last month the Supreme Court heard a case about the right of the lab that developed the test for the BRCA-1 mutation to hold a patent on the gene and charge whatever they want. The test can cost anywhere from $300 to $3000. When Dana first found out, we all did a lot of research and reading. These were the ones I found most helpful: In The Family, a documentary by Joanna Rudnick. Pretty is What Changes, by Jessica Queller. (via jaybushman) Angelina Jolie’s op-ed will reach a lot of people and I’m very thankful for that, because it will make the choices so many women and men will have to face much less alien — but no less expensive. (via jaybushman)
About Me(gan)
Megan tells handcrafted stories on the internet. Sometimes that's called marketing.
Megan is the South half of The General Cafe and spends her days at The Collective Digital Studio.
She only recently discovered narwhals are real.
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