The Dinka people (Jieng) are a community, composed of many ethnic groups, inhabiting the East and West Banks of River Nile, from Mangalla to Renk, regions of Bahr el Ghazal, Upper Nile (former two of three Southern Provinces in Sudan) and Abyei Area of the Angok Dinka in South Khordofan of Sudan.
They number around 4.5 million people according to the 2008 Sudan census, constituting about 18% of the population of the entire country, and the largest ethnic tribe in South Sudan. Dinka, or as they refer to themselves, Muonyjang (singular) and jieng (plural), one of the branches of the River Lake Nilotes (mainly sedentary agripastoral peoples of the Nile Valley and African Great Lakes region who speak Nilotic languages, including the Nuer and Luo).
mong the Dinka, corsets, known as “Manlual” are worn by men as a form of daily attire which primarily symbolize a man’s age group as well as his wealth within the community.
The wealth of a Dinka is measured according to the height of the back of a corset; the higher the projection, the richer the wearer is. A man from a family rich in cattle can afford a high bride price. Their traditional corsets are color coded to show their status in life: a red and blue/black corset indicates a young man 15 to 25 years old, pink and purple for those 25-30, and a yellow and blue one shows he is over 30 years old and ready for marriage.
Courtship begins for Dinka men at 20, and for girls at 17. A man however may not marry until he is 30 years old, as he must raise the sufficient number of cattle to pay the bride price.
Removal of the beaded garments, which serve as a great representation of the tribes creative abilities, is not initiated until the wearer reaches a certain age, usually when he is ready for marriage. The ‘manlual’ can therefore usually worn for over 15 -20 years before removal and are raised in height ever so often.
Women’ corsets, Alual, are different from those worn by men and often decorated with cowry shells. They are of a looser, bodice style and when worn, women’ corsets appear ample and hang from the neck like a large necklace. In some rare cases, young girls will wear a tight corset with an important projection in the back such as those of the men. This corset will remain on her and will be cut open only at her wedding. Fewer Dinka women are seen wearing bodices today, partly because of the influence of Christianity on Dinka culture and standards of modesty.
1. Dinka girls, Sudan
2. Dinka bodice, Sudan, late 19th to early 20th century
3. Dinka man’s corset, Sudan, late 19th to early 20th century
4. Dinka man’s necklace, Sudan, worn at or shortly before wedding to show his eligibility and the wealth of his family in cattle
[Image is a chest up shot of Red Robin. Cowl is off, but the rest of his uniform is still on. His eyes are shut and his head is resting on one hand. There are papers on the desk he’s leaning on.
End ID.]
Someone: *calls me by my name*
Me: *desperately wracks my Very Bad Memory Brain, trying to remember where I know them from, forgetting I have my name on all my social media*
Personally, I think Tim and the other bats GENERALLY are pretty good at basic self-care and eating. For one thing, they have to be, to do what they do. But canonically Tim tends to bounce back pretty fast even if he is a bit mopey at first (see: Brentwood). The lowest point I think is probably around the time Bruce “died.” Some people have just started coming back (Kon), but he lost a lot of people in rapid-fire succession (kon, his dad Jack, steph, Cass to Hong Kong, plus more!), lost Robin to a kid who tried to kill him (damian via Dick), and then felt like he was going insane. The Red Robin arc where he’s hunting for Bruce is probably his loneliest and most depressive, IMO, but definitely the result of a rock bottom lowpoint and not his general baseline.
Canonically, he’s usually hard on himself but not depressed. But it’s one of those character arcs that can help people via fic so I don’t get upset about fanon portrayals of him as struggling with it on and off.
Also, even during that arc, he was more likely to go towards the hyper-controlling end the spectrum. He controlled every aspect of his life, instead of ignoring his needs.
He’s struggled with getting enough sleep most of his superhero career. Having to preform for his dad during the day and fight crime at night took a lot out of him. We have a lot of canon examples of him falling asleep during classes and on dates. Some examples of him talking to himself about how tired he is, and he’ll just look up One More Fact before sleeping. And so many examples of him sighing at the sun as he comes home for his two hour nap before school.
But it’s rarely been framed as bad self-care. Just a frustrating result of the job. He tries to sleep.
Until the Red Robin series, he also ate a lot of junk food. He delighted in eating both Alfred’s, and his house keeper’s, food. (His step mom may have been a health nut with weird food, though. I’m not sure.) We have one example in Red Robin of him eating a salad and commenting on how much his female eating partner is downing. (~Eek~) Otherwise, no eating issues I’m aware of.
I do relate with his fanon depressive characterization, and definitely think his Red Robin run can be read as a depressive period, brought on by trauma. But physically neglecting his needs isn’t a very natural way to characterize Tim.
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.
This entire thing is fascinating to me. Truth is, I don’t even look at the ratio of hits to kudos on my fics. That number’s kinda meaningless to me, because as a reader, I’ve probably been responsible for AT LEAST dozens of hits on each of my favorite fics – for which AO3 only allowed me to leave a single kudos.
I also open fics on multiple devices to read/reread them. I open tabs for fics I intend to look at later and then revisit them (often multiple times) before I get a chance to actually sit down and read them. These things add up.
Hits without equivalent kudos don’t mean people aren’t enjoying a fic. It might be the exact opposite. It might mean you have people who love your fic so much they’ve read it ten times this month – on their laptops, phones, tablets, etc…and ten times the month before.
Kudos and comments mean A LOT. I know this as a writer who gets overwhelmed and excited by every single new comment, bookmark with notes, tumblr tag, and kudos email. But fixating too much on the numbers is a frustrating and futile process. I know it’s hard to not get caught up in that, but it really shouldn’t be something that you let discourage you from continuing to share your work.
Good thoughts about comments and kudos
Taking down your work if nobody pays attention to it just makes it look like attention is all that matters to you. I can’t imagine taking my fanfics down because they didn’t get any comments. =/ The worth of your work is NOT confirmed or denied by how high the numbers on it get.
People need to have a little more self-confidence and realize that lack of attention might be because nobody knows the work exists. It might be because readers aren’t interested in the premise of that particular story. Might be that they are there and they’re just not commenting.
Don’t get me wrong, comments and kudos are fantastic. It makes my day to get feedback on my work, especially if it made somebody think enough to tell me their thoughts about it. I have a policy for myself that if I read it, I comment and kudo it, every time. But I know not everybody does that.
I comment on chapters as I read each one, but people don’t all do that, either. Sometimes I get one comment on the last chapter of a 25-chapter fic saying how they’ve been reading since chapter one and loved every word. And me, I still posted the 25 chapters, even when most of them didn’t get a single comment. If you love writing and you’re creating stories anyway, might as well share them.
Try leading by example, too. Comment and kudo if you read it on Ao3. Reblog it on Tumblr. Make fic rec lists. Give little fics without thousands of kudos a try. If you read a fic that has no comments, be the first to leave one. If you love a fic to pieces and REALLY want to make the author’s day, draw fanart and link their fic in the description. Try browsing the fics of the people who leave comments and kudos for you. I’ve found great stories and made new friends this way!
I think I’m pretty good at commenting, but I probably only comment on one in five stories I read. I give kudos to maybe a third, and that’s keeping in mind that I mostly just read the few authours I’m following, that I already know I love.
The thing is, I CAN’T really comment on over half the fic I read. They were often good, but didn’t fit my tastes. I’m aromantic, and even if I enjoy a fic with shipping, it can be impossible to say something that doesn’t start with, ‘even though I don’t like this pairing – .’
I try to talk around my issues, but it can feel like a lie to just say, ‘I loved this!’ when your feelings are actually, ‘one of the main plot elements was really dull/offputting, but your characterization and that scene with his sister made up for it!’
And sometimes the story is good enough to finish, but I obviously wasn’t the intended audience and only sort-of liked it. It’s good, but not for me. What am I supposed to say?
It takes me 20 minutes to write most comments. Even the one line ones.
They’re HARD for me.
It’s important to have realistic expectations. Your fic isn’t going to be for everyone, and a lot of the people it isn’t for are going to read it anyways.
(Also, the comment about a dozen different hits being just one person is totally true. I frequently visit a fic 5 separate times in the process of reading one chapter, once. On different devices, and different days, and different moods. Some fic, I open every day for a week or more, seeing if my brain can concentrate on that sort of content today.)
One day I wanna be rich enough that I can just like. Give away hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in like scholarships or grants or whatever. That when I see someone make a post like “hey can I get $50 for groceries” I can just donate $1000. Or tip my server their rent money. Like that’s the dream
You don’t have to love abortion. You can dislike it. Maybe it even makes you sad. The way you view abortion is up to you. If you don’t like abortion, you can advocate for proper sex education, access to birth control and other things that have been shown to lower unplanned pregnancies. You don’t have to like abortion.
But what you can’t do is disrespect somebody for having an abortion. You can’t take away that choice from women because you don’t like it. Your emotions are not somebody else’s responsibility. Your emotions aren’t more important than anyone else’s bodily autonomy. You don’t have to like abortion, but you have to respect other people’s rights and that includes the right to safe, accessible, abortion.
I HATE how tumblr brings up your old tags as you’re typing a new tag because I really don’t!! Want to remember!!! Some of the things I’ve said on this godforsaken site!!!!
tag this post with your first result you get when you type will
kiragecko 