I love Clark Kent because realistically both a nice 6'5 superhero with godlike powers AND a friendly 6'5 country boy reporter would be rolling in bitches, but Clark suffers from terminal Sweetiepie Syndrome and has zero game as a result
Fighting for his LIFE on the phone with a cute girl. He’s so real for this.
I’m happy to see that the notes are still divided into people who are roasting him for the use of “hey-o” and people who are being very open about their carnal desire for this man.
There’s a handful of notes on this going “well fuck you, do you know how hard it is to BE the speaker and not have anyone greet you?” and uh, yes, yes I do, because I did those stupid ass soft skills/resilience/insert other assorted nonsense workshops for schools for a living for a while, and I still agree with this.
The key to being an effective speaker is the ability to understand your audience. You need to understand people in order to build a rapport with them. And you need to build a rapport with them in order to effectively guide them from where they are, to where you need them to be.
So. Here is the situation from the perspective of the audience: this random person, whom they have never met before and do not care about, is being paid by employers/school powers that be to come speak on a thing. In other words, the speaker is the one benefitting from being there. Meanwhile, the audience has likely been ordered to be there, for no immediate, tangible benefit in return. It is early in the morning, they are sleep-deprived and under-caffeinated, they have a shit ton of stuff on their to-do list, they are unconvinced whatever the speaker is going to say is going to be of any use or relevance whatsoever, and so they see this talk as a waste of time that they could instead be spending on sleep or at least finishing off things that are actually necessary for work/school. And now this rando, whom I repeat, is supposed to be the service provider, whose presence is already a pain, is asking for even more effort on the audience’s part by asking them to smile and be chipper. All before saying a single other word that might convince said audience that they are going to get any benefit whatsoever out of being there. Fuck that.
You gotta understand, you are not some rock star that people are already invested in and actively want to see. Those get to do the “scream! I can’t hear you! LOUDER!” thing. The fact of the matter is, you are probably someone your audience has no interest in seeing, and until you give them a reason for wanting to be there, you cannot ask them for even more emotional effort. That’s not going to endear them to you.
I am by no means a particularly great speaker, but I can tell you now that I have gotten far more immediate rapport and engagement by simply going “hello hello, morning, how is everyone?” and then when I get the predictably unenthusiastic mass groaning and grumbling, and unenergetic “morning"s back in return, replying "heh, big mood. It’s final project season innit; how sleep deprived are y'all? –yeouch, intense, well I’ll try my best to keep this as painless as I possibly can; I’m here today to talk about–” etc etc. Simple, sympathetic, and while it’s not the most energetic and enthusiastic thing in the world, it puts me on “their” side and opens a connection that I can build on for the rest of the talk, instead of instantly making my audience feel 10x more tired and hostile.
If you are not a speaker being paid to be there, but are instead someone giving a presentation for an assignment or presenting a paper or whatever, then I’ve found that being sincere and a little self-deprecating, possibly just a tiny bit vulnerable works pretty well: “Oh god, so full disclosure, I don’t speak very often and I’m sweating bullets right now, and also I tend to babble like a bullet train when I’m nervous so if at any point you cannot understand me please ask me to slow down, but I have a thing I need to present, and I think it’s pretty cool, and hopefully you do too.” Your audience has probably been in your shoes before, and are now inclined to be nice to you out of sympathy.
In both cases, it’s about understanding your listeners and where you stand in relation to them and using that to build that initial connection. You cannot demand connection; it never fucking works.
hey what was in the water with the stucky fandom for real they did some off the fucking chainnnn things on ao3 and for what.
the full on courtroom drama fics. the illustrated fics on ao3 that were like fucking baroque oil paintings. the epistolary shit. some mf wrote pieces of a fake book by a historian. we had works cited. this fanfction has a bibliography. how can we bottle this and distribute it en masse to other fandoms.
This post sent me down a multi-day stucky rabbit hole so here’s a compilation of all the fics people mentioned in the tags that I was able to find. Haven’t read all of them so can’t vouch for everything but I will say the ones I have read were exquisite:
hey what was in the water with the stucky fandom for real they did some off the fucking chainnnn things on ao3 and for what.
the full on courtroom drama fics. the illustrated fics on ao3 that were like fucking baroque oil paintings. the epistolary shit. some mf wrote pieces of a fake book by a historian. we had works cited. this fanfiction has a bibliography. how can we bottle this and distribute it en masse to other fandoms.
I’ve had Sailor Moon on in the background all week while I work, so when I saw Clark’s magical girl transformation on My Adventures With Superman I was like, ‘yep, time for a quick style mashup.’ XD
this is the fucking funniest thing ive ever seen im in tears of laughter. (right axis) . this is a work of fucking art
As you all can see when I started to purchase $10 pocket knives at gas stations in late 2017 and continued to do so once a year every year the gap between my annual military expenditure and that of the U.S. quickly began to close.
here it is on one axis lmao
Thank you for this simplified lesson in what propaganda looks like.
Someone smarter than me has probably gone into the semiotics of it but this kind of non-graph – whose primary purpose is to mystify readily available and perfectly readable information which suggests a conclusion disagreeable to the graphmaker – it has to serve some function beyond simple lying. It has to reflect some kind of magical thinking, a belief in taking an inconvenient truth and physically overstriking it on printed paper as a form of curse. The reliability with which graphs like this appear on major news networks and prestige periodicals, where the audience includes the nation’s most powerful businessmen and politicians, has to reflect some kind of ritual behavior. My money’s on its use as propaganda itself being ritual behavior, a blunt assertion that the truth is whatever the powerful make of it. The availability to the public is not an accident and the clarification of how asinine it is by regime opponents seems to be part of the ritual
The information is being deliberately obscured to A) partially encrypt the information from the average persons understanding, and B) reify the information to a more abstract yet politically specific sense of Importance.
Imo this fits the definition of Occult. This graph has been Occluded.
