I have been a witch for a very long time, more than half my life now. I don’t consciously attend to xian holidays but they are pervasive in American culture. This morning I wanted to make a quick trip to Aldi’s for a few things for the week. I had a recollection that their Sunday opening hours might be a bit later and went to their website to confirm that. I was puzzled to see that the local store was listed as closed today and reopening Monday. I spent some little time trying to confirm that they had abruptly decided to be closed on Sundays. It took almost an hour for me to see a news article that reminded me it was easter for those who practice the western version of xianity. While I am pleased that any retail establishment gives their employees a day off for a holiday, I still have to question why they chose the Sunday rather than the Saturday which was even more significant for their Jewish employees. For anyone who doesn’t think xianity is a privileged status in America, all you have to do is look at the holidays that are routinely observed. Out of nine major holidays that involve closures of offices and some business, a third are for religious or religious themed holidays related to xianity. None are for any other religion. If you practice any other faith, you have to use your personal time to have the day off, if you are fortunate enough to have that provided or simply choose between being paid or honoring your own faith.
The Endurance was trapped in Antarctic ice for about a year and finally sank in November 1915:
Famously, Ernest Shackleton used a jury-rigged lifeboat to sail over 700 miles to a whaling station, seek help, return and rescue his entire crew, which imo is a greater feat than reaching the South Pole. The ocean currents circling Antartica are some of the stormiest and coldest in the world. How the heck do you cross that in a small open boat without sinking, starving, or freezing to death?
Anyway, I'm impressed that the Endurance looks to be in pretty good shape considering how much it got crushed by pack ice. And it was just discovered yesterday (March 9)!
Ayup. Not only that, but I hadn't realized until I read Wikipedia: they were adrift on the ice for six months after Endurance sank with whatever they could salvage. This after they'd already been trapped in or next to the ship since January 2015, surviving Antarctic winter. They rode an ice floe north until it broke up in April 1916, then they sailed for six days to the nearest island in lifeboats, following the navigational skills of the Endurance's captain Worsley. (Shackleton was the expedition leader and organizer, but not the skipper.)
Once on solid ground they finished upgrading one of the lifeboats with bits of another, which they'd already started doing while on the ice:
(more photos and story below; Not quite as noble as the Carpathia, but epic)
Above: the ship's carpenter fit the rescue boat with small masts, decking and canvas, waterproofing it with seal blood, oil paint and lamp wick (probably jammed in the cracks; braided cotton cord swells to make a tighter fit when wet— a trick I learned in primitive camping). Winter had started by the time it was ready for launch. At least they had oil-burning stoves — life-saving, if they didn't set the boat on fire.
Shackleton took the amazing Captain Worsley as navigator and 3 other men (including, shrewdly, the two most likely to cause friction in his absence) in the lifeboat and headed north, trusting the winds to carry them east.
"Think it'll work?" "It'll take a miracle."
Wikipedia says it took them 17 days to sail 800 miles to South Georgia. They almost capsized multiple times, especialky while fighting the freezing gales off Cape Horn, which not only tossed them but threatened to sink them by coating every surface with ice, which they had to chip off with an axe.
S. Georgia wasn't the closest land, but it was the only bit they could make with the Antarctic westerlies behind them. They had only one chance: If they blew past and missed it, there was no turning back. And Worsley had to navigate by the sun from a pitching deck under an almost always cloudy sky. The whole time they had one person on watch in case the sun came out, one person managing the sailing, and one person bailing water madly while the fourth slept.
They did it. They hit the backside of South Georgia, spent three days crossing it because it was safer to go on foot than to try to navigate around and maybe blow past it, and Shackleton convinced a whaling ship to take him back to Elephant Island to save his entire crew of 27 men. (Even that took three tries, as steamships kept running out of fuel sailing against the wind.)
… And when they finally got home, no one was the least bit interested in their epic saga, because in the meantime World War I had happened. "You were stranded in Antarctica? Go cry me a river. Congrats in finding a creative way to avoid conscription and the pandemic."
So I have FEELS, seeing poor old Endurance at long last, discovered 112 years after all those eerie yet beautiful photos taken of her trapped in the ice by a photogapher with nothing else to photograph. Here she be, with her name still legible across the stern:
She kept Shackleton's crew alive through a terrible Antarctic winter:
Shackleton's expedition had aimed to be the first to cross and document the entire continent of Antarctica, 4 years after Amundson first reached the South Pole. The Trans-Antarctic mission failed, but because Shackleton had prepared supplies so thoroughly and selected crewmates with both versatile skills and good people skills, they survived a disaster that few others would have.
They're basically the Apollo 13 of the early 20th century.
One more glimpse of the Endurance before and after:
This History Channel page does the expedition more justice than I can, with some quotes and diary excerpts (warning to dog and/or cat lovers... sad but quick ending for several dogs and one cat, mentioned briefly in a sentence):
Shackleton, by his actions, has the second greatest feat of navigation by a European in the distance traveled in a small boat. The first? William Bligh. Four thousand miles in an open boat.
An omega variant would be one of the last covid variants and the trend is that covid is slowly becoming more infectious and less severe with each mutation. This would mean that the omega variant would spread and multiply extremely easily, but would also be weak and mild in symptoms.
Therefore we can consider the omega variant submissive and breedable.
the reason bisexual and nonbinary people get so much hate is because we challenge the idea that people can be separated into little boxes to stop them from mixing with and “corrupting” the others. doesn’t matter which bathroom i use, if they’re marked with a binary gender then i’m gonna be in there with people who aren’t my gender. doesn’t matter who i date (or don’t), there’s always the potential that i could date someone with a gender different from previous partners. we are living breathing proof that any attempt to contain human gender & sexuality is doomed to failure and i think that’s very sexy of us
someone made the extremely valid point in the tags that this also applies to pan people, agender people, and aroace people, which it absolutely does. what’s up my pals, let’s be queer and do crimes destroy the cisheteropatriarchy together
hello yes this is an excellent example of what ‘queer’ actually means and why it’s important.
queer means ‘does not fit your standard boxes, society, whatcha gonna do about it?’
Honestly, I don’t even care if people I know donate. AO3 is designed so that a few generous patrons can make a nice thing exist for everyone… But holy shit do I wish tumblr would learn how websites and companies work because it is important to know what motivates them.
On AO3, MORE TRAFFIC IS NOT BETTER HOLYFUCK. That’s only true when traffic = more ad revenue or a better pitch to venture capitalists or something.
to clarify, rather than scold: The Archive Of Our Own is a nonprofit organization that runs an archive of fanfiction, specifically for the purposes of recording and maintaining all fanfics uploaded to it. it was founded after livejournal and fanfiction.net repeatedly deleted queer and ‘problematic’ fanfics in order to please advertisers and keep getting ad revenue. for decades, fandom was at the mercy of corporations who repeatedly deleted–with little warning and no mercy–whatever platforms were used to host fanfiction, especially dark, queer, kinky, and immoral fanfiction that would annoy corporate interests or scare off investors or offend advertisers.
AO3 is specifically relies on donations, rather than ad revenue, because it is the Archive Of Our Own, and is not answerable to any political agenda other than protecting and maintaining, again, all the fanfiction uploaded to it. there are checks and balances, and there’s a governing board, and they’re all dead serious about making sure that the archive endures any attempts by outside parties to censor or remove its content, no matter how abhorrent that content is.
the archive is an archive, not a social network or a platform. it hosts content and it serves that content to users in an efficient way–hence the phenomenal tag system–but it is meant to safeguard writers and their writing, not to profit from its users. it literally can’t profit off of its users or monetize their interactions in any way, just by virtue of its own structure: all money given to a nonprofit goes towards furthering that organization’s mission.
see, when a company or corporation makes money, it pays for labor and upkeep and then the guys that own the company keep the rest of the money, and that’s profit. when a nonprofit makes money, it pays for labor and upkeep and then if it has extra, it reinvests in various ways, like building new things or improving old things, or it saves the money for future labor and upkeep it might need.
the archive cares that users are able to control their own experiences of it, and filter out the stuff they don’t want to see. they care that users are protected from harassment. but they don’t profit from users’ engagement with the site, so they don’t do anything to encourage traffic the way a for-profit site that’s monetized engagement has.
hopefully this explanation helps someone.
tl;dr, a non-profit archive can’t profit from traffic the way for-profit social networks do, so it doesn’t care about you in a completely different way.
I feel like the problem is that kids these days (yeah, yeah) have grown up in a world where everything is monetized, to the point where they can’t imagine an entire archive, that exists, for free, on the internet, with no nefarious purpose, without the intent of makin money. It’s not for profit. There’s no strings attached. Nobody’s profiting behind the scenes somewhere. People just can’t CONCEIVE of it.
The site is so well designed and looks so professional that the Youths see it, assume it is a Corporate Entity, and therefore must be reflexively Battled Against as The Enemy.
Without noticing that there are…no ads on the site.
No, because AO3 is genuinely such a good place to find fanfic.
Wattpad has become a hellscape of ads after you read a part. If you want to skip to a different chapter or part of the story? Ad. You get an ad. Unless you get premium. Or if you pay for no ads.
I’ve been on Wattpad since 2016. I saw fanfic on there, read for a while, and genuinely preferred it over other sites. The shit writing was a joke to me, and yes cringe stuff was there, but my favorite author was there and their writing was fantastic.
But then in 2018 or some time ads started getting added more often to the chapters. You used to have ads between the parts of stories on mobile, but you could scroll past them easily. But now It could be like, 6-9 chapters spaced out, but an ad would show up that you couldn’t scroll past. They’d be easily skippable, so I just skipped them and went on my way.
Then they added them more frequently. They offered their premium version or whatever and as more people bought it to get rid of the annoying adds, they gave those who didn’t buy premium more ads.
Wattpad is still usable, but it’s not worth the ads. I still have Wattpad on my phone, but I haven’t read a full fic on there in ages. Too many ads.
AO3 is an incredible place to read from. There will never be ads on AO3 because it’s a non profit. They can’t make money from my time reading.
Not only that, they let fanfiction be something writers can make. When I started reading in 2016, I would find fics with warnings, disclaimers, all that I didn’t understand at the time.
“These are not my characters. They belong to [people who made them] from [fandom they’re from]” or something similar to that effect.
I never saw a fic get taken down, but I know it happened. Companies and authors would go after fanfic writers for creating fiction with their characters. They would take these authors to court, and win because authors didn’t have the resources to fight them.
Ao3 gives and acts like an author’s resources. It has a team that defends writers, fights companies, and keeps fanfic legal. The only request for doing such a thing?
They ask you not to promote or link any sort of commission or Kofi page on their site. And ask for donations occasionally.
Keeping commission links off their site help keep their arguments in court valid, and donations help keep the site running.
Tldr; AO3 will never have ads that make the site unusable, keeps fanfic a legal activity, and hosts donation drives to keep their massive archive accessible to anyone who wants it.
Don’t hate on AO3 if you like reading fanfiction. If you enjoy a fandom culture, support AO3. They support fandom right to exist.
You know what’s happening on Tumblr right now with the Apple censorship debacle?
That’s literally what used to happen on sites like fanfiction.net and LiveJournal. In fact that exact thing happening on LJ is what STARTED THE AO3. There had been ideas bandied about in the past, but Strikethrough and Boldthrough—which you can, conveniently, look up on the Fanlore project run by the OTW (or just ask here on the tumbles, plenty of us were there for it)—took those ideas and went “until you do this, you will NEVER be safe, and it will ALWAYS be the queer and disabled people who suffer.”
AO3 IS LITERALLY A DIRECT ATTACK AGAINST CENSORSHIP AND CORPORATISM. THAT IS THE REASON IT EXISTS. THAT IS WHY IT IS A NONPROFIT AND NOT A COMPANY. ITS WHOLE PURPOSE IS TO NOT BE A COMPANY, BECAUSE COMPANIES FUCK FANDOM OVER.
Why do people stop commenting on fics if they’re more than a week or two old? Please comment on old fics. Tell me you like my one shot from 2014. Tell me you like my old multi-chap I finished in 2016 that I spent a year writing. I will be fucking thrilled.
Fics are not social media posts. There’s no “stalking” someone’s “old posts”. They’re meant to be found and enjoyed years down the line. No need to be nervous.
As a writer, I am thrilled when someone finds my latest work and then is motivated to go back through my prior stuff and kudos or comment. I literally sit and squee over each and every comment.
NSFW will be tagged as #lemon
sorta NSFW is #Lime
Weird fet shit/ extreme NSFW is #orange
reblog to spread awareness that we’re back on the citrus scale
Orange was originally like…a PG-13 warning. You would tag orange for fics that stopped at making out.
What you’re thinking of is “Grapefruit”.
The scale goes as such:
Orange (PG-13, basically making out like I said) - Lime (Non-explicit sexual actions, think an M rated fic instead of NC-17) - Lemon (explicit, graphic sex, the NC-17 fics) - Grapefruit (hardcore/weird stuff)
I am dead serious: If you are a Walmart employee, at any level and in any store — like if you are a high school kid with a part time job stocking shelves — message me any question you have about unions. Like ask me “What’s a union” if you want. I will explain it to you.
I am a grievance chair for a white collar union whose workplace only unionized within the last five years and whose management fought as every step of the way, but in the end we fucking won. It can be done, and I can tell you how.
I like how it’s described as a union could “cripple American Capitalism” when more precisely it’s just that a union would be so powerful as to force WalMart (or any other company) to pay their workers like human beings. That’s not going to break Walmart. They’ll barely notice.
They’ve successfully convinced us that the unions are the greedy monsters. For so many years, the companies have painted unions as “we want you to pay janitors three million dollars a year and if you don’t we’ll set your stores on fire”.
But it’s more like “We want you to take an almost imperceptible fraction of your bountiful profits and use it to make your employees’ live marginally better, and maybe give them medical benefits, y’know, so they don’t die”.
Big companies did not stop hiring ten year olds to work in coal mines because they just woke up one day and said “my god, we’re monsters”. They did it because their workers stood together and said “really, enough of this crap”.
Companies are not going to give people raises unless it’s economically necessary that they do so. Anything they can do to lower their expenses, and raise their profits, they are going to do. And no one person can stop them.
But thousands of people, millions of people? Better chances.
Just another reminder that Walmart Germany was a spectacular fail because of ver.di (which is a national service trade union that has it’s control over almost all trade and service companies in Germany) among other things.
Like, ver.di essentially came up to the CEO of Walmart Germany and was like “Hi, welcome, we wish you the best and that we can work together well :)” and the dude was like “hahaha no” and tried to pull the american concept here so ver.di pulled out a list of all the breaches of german law that Walmart was doing (underpaying workers, trying to avoid paying health care by using part-timers, trying to be open for more than 80 hours per week, firing people on short notice without warning or exit payments, etc) and long story short, they got some massive hefty fines for it. They also set up a list of demands for the workers and organized national strikes to push them through, making the employees of 85 hypermarkets neatly stand in front of the store doors with signs, whistles and chants (and certainly not the “Wallmart! Wallmart!” chant). In the end, that plus other things caused them to bail after 9 years with a gigantic loss (almost a billion just from sales) from one of the best retail markets in the world.
So all those issues like “no healthcare” or “work full-time and need food stamps” or “work on sundays and holidays” and shit? Unions are there to set their foot down against that for you. They are there to keep you safe from the corps wrath while fighting for your rights.
Cause if you, an individual, complain, they just fire you and laugh about it. A union is a collection of hundreds up to MILLIONS of people, supported by lawyers, going against employers for you.
In Denmark, due to union negotiations & refusal to work for slave wages, the McDonald’s basic pay comes out to about $20 US / Hour. The big mac there costs about 60 cents more.
Reminder than Walmart won’t even be paying time and a half during thanksgiving and Black Friday to their employees. They only give them a DISCOUNT On two specific days. Shit pay and their only “perk” is to give the money back to Walmart by shopping there.
OK, my boyfriend’s tongue game literally made a lesbian reconsider her life. It was at a swingers’ party and if I am very drunk, I will sometimes tell the complete story. Anyway, if you’re a straight man and you admit to being such an ineffectual creature, you deserve the knowledge that you are a selfish hunk of protoplasm and will attract women who are there only for your money and/or position.And all women need to get themselves someone who will make them come like the evening express.Seriously, for ANYONE, if your partner is this disinterested in your pleasure, you need to find someone new. Or not. Ice cream, take out, and a decent vibrator work just fine.
Somewhere in my notes in the last few days I saw someone add some tags that I’ve been thinking about ever since. I wish I could find them again (or that I’d just saved their post at the time) because I think they made a lot of sense.
They were talking about how fanfic is becoming more and more mainstream while still remaining largely transgressive. It’s such an interesting dichotomy to think about!
On the one hand, you have sites like AO3 and realities like widespread high speed internet access being more and more accessible to larger and larger groups of people. This makes it incredibly easy for anyone at all to find and read fanfic.
On the other hand, you have the roots of fanfic. It was born out of marginalized groups such as women, people of colour, and members of the queer community deciding to take the stories that had been aimed at a largely male, white, heterosexual audience and inverting them into something they could enjoy and relate to. To this day, fanfic is a place where people write the kinds of stories that don’t get made into movies and TV shows. The kinds of stories that don’t get published or end up on the New York Times bestseller list.
Fanfic used to be written and shared in secret. People used to hide it. People still do hide the fact that they read or write it. But it’s becoming something that more and more people are becoming more and more aware of.
So now there’s a spotlight starting to shine on fanfic. People who aren’t looking for transgressive works are finding them where they always were. People who think the status quo is fine are getting upset when they enter a place where the status quo is constantly being upended.
The tags on that post that I can’t find made the point that popular media is curated and sanitized and stripped of most of its controversy in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. But that also makes that audience expect all media to be curated and sanitized in the same way. When they encounter the messy, controversial, ugly, radical, difficult things that people write in fanfic, they’re unprepared.
Fanfic isn’t big media. Fanfic authors aren’t being edited and filtered and polished - and nor are their works. The clash between the expectations of people new to fanfic and accustomed to popular media and the realities of what fanfic is and what it’s being written for - that’s part of this struggle that fandom is going through right now. It’s been going on since the beginning of course, but it’s getting louder every year.
I’m still thinking my way through this, but it really does make a lot of sense to me. If those were your tags, please let me know so I can credit you with the ideas at the core of this post.
And if you have any ideas for how we as fans can better introduce the newbies to the culture and expectations in fandom, I’d love to hear it. The better we can guide people into our space, the better they’ll fit in when they join it.
While I’m not entirely sure how, here are a few what ideas. If you’re coming into fanfic new, here is what you need to know. Perhaps other folks can think of more diplomatic ways to frame these thoughts.
Fandom has historically been dominated by the weird. Weird people, weird stories. That isn’t a bad thing. A lot of folks in fandom wear weird as a badge of honour, something we reclaimed from bullies and other abusers who slung the word and related ones at us. We are not normal and do not seek to be normal. If that idea bothers you, you are still welcome, but know that you are a guest. A lot of folks in fandom have been burned by aggressive normalcy, and start baring teeth when it intrudes into our spaces.
The author is dead. All this means is that the original canon author or authors can tell you their interpretation of the story, but they cannot control your own interpretations or imagination: their interpretation is no more or less important than anyone else’s. Something being noncompliant with canon does not make it badly-written.
Alternate universes exist. If someone wants to write characters from a serious crime drama in a sitcom, they are allowed to do that. If someone wants to explore what would happen if that horrific mass murderer was redeemed or never evil, they are allowed to do that. If someone just really likes dragons and wants to write about everyone being a dragon, they are allowed to do that.
If you write fanfic, you are also an author, so you are also dead. Once you release your ideas into the wild, other people can and will do weird things with them. The sooner you accept that, the better.
You will find porn of it if you go looking. If you don’t, some folks will take that as a challenge and go make some. As long as good-faith efforts are made to keep out people who shouldn’t or don’t want to see it, there is nothing wrong with this.
A canon being made for kids and teens does not mean that all sections of the fandom are for kids and teens. Adults can be into works for the younger set, and as long as there are clear boundaries between work that’s appropriate for kids and work that isn’t, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and absolutely nothing wrong with adult or dark works based on those stories.
Some people will really hate your favourite characters. Some people will think your favourite pairing is gross, or boring, or that the characters would be better off with someone else. Some people will think that show or game or book that got you through the roughest moments of your life is absolute trash. And that’s okay. Not everyone has to like your favourite things.
Someone writing dark stories about terrible things happening to your favourite characters, even dark stories that may mirror some trauma you’ve been through, are not writing about you. They’re not. It is none of your business why they’re writing it. Their only duty to you is to make sure you can avoid their work if you want to. Again, the sooner you accept this, the better off you’ll be.
It’s okay if you want to write something dark and depraved. Lots of people do, and if it’s weird, well, fandom has historically been dominated by the weird.
It’s okay if you want to write nothing but fluff.
It’s okay, no matter what you want to write.
Just be courteous and tag your work. Even if all you want to tag it with is “this may contain dark topics.”
This feels related to a post I saw a while back about how so much of fandom is rooted in neuro divergence. The hyper fixation, the “squeeing”, the encyclopedic knowledge. And how, as fandom gets more and more mainstream, those hallmarks of being a Fan get tagged as *cringey*
I love almost every point here, but if there’s one thing I would tell new fans, it’s this:
Most fanfic is straight.
These are the best hard numbers I have (with multi/other including all fics labeled as more than one of m/m, f/m, and f/f along with ones labeled as multi/other):
AO3 is the gay porn bookstore, so AO3 is the site that cares about:
Being free from corporate overlords
Not monetizing your data in creepy ways
Minute and detailed kink labeling
Protecting the freaky content
If you hate Bad Kinks, that’s fine. Just know that you will never get the kind of labeling AO3 has from the people who pander to the mainstream. If you want to get rid of The Bad Stuff, the kind of websites you’ll end up with are a sea of nigh unsearchable het, like Wattpad. And the same kinks will be there. They just won’t be labeled clearly.
People imagine that fandom is mostly queer because their own bubble is, because queer stuff sticks in their mind more as anomalous, making it seem more frequent than it really is, and because the only places that label clearly are the queer ones.
If you want to tear down the places with queer+freaky content, you will end up tearing down the only places that protect queer content at all.
No, literally no one missed that. For you, the big thing is underage. For someone else, it’s RPF existing at all. For someone else, it’s rape-as-kink.
I reiterate: If you hate Bad Kinks, that’s fine. But AO3 looks how it does because it’s opposed to censorship. A site less opposed to censorship would also be less into this type of metadata and would have less clear labeling.
Perhaps Wattpad’s terms of service would be more to your taste.
Here’s the paradox with AO3 vs. less permissive archives like WattPad: the more ratings you lock out, the harder it becomes for readers to actually avoid it.
Back in the day, I helped run a fanfic competition that allowed G through R but not NC17. It actually wasn’t because the mods disapproved of the sexy and/or gory, but for purely practical reasons. But it meant that a lot of people who wanted to compete would go around lowering their ratings at the archives where the fic was posted from NC17 to R so they’d be eligible. (Strictly-speaking unnecessary, since we had our own ratings scheme and didn’t just go with what the archive said, but it did make them less likely to get pinged.) And why not? From their POV, if they got caught they’d be no worse off than if they’d just not participated.
I guarantee you, if they did this for our competition they did the same thing for archives they wanted to post on that allowed R but not NC17. And the big losers there are the readers, specifically folks who’d comfortably read an R fic but pass on an NC17; they’re losing a valuable tool to manage their own reading experience. Authors of R-rated fic also lose out to a lesser degree because readers will be more cautious about reading their stuff. Anytime you draw a line there will always be fic just on the other side of that line, and some writers of said fic will always fudge their ratings and warnings and descriptions to try and slide in under the wire.
This is nothing new to Tumblr-ites. Remember when NSFW content could actually be tagged as NSFW, and folks who perhaps didn’t want explicit stuff visible on their phone when they were around small children (or, you know, their parents) had the option to blacklist? Wasn’t that wild? And wouldn’t those of us who prefer to avoid that rather have the tools to do it again? I would.
My point here is, if your goal is to let people who’d rather not read ______ (whatever that is!) to effectively avoid it, you want to make it as easy and safe as possible for authors to say “Hey, this fic contains ______ , so be aware of that going in.” And you really don’t want to incentivize shaving the rating or leaving off warnings they think are appropriate, because that’s not helpful for anyone.
(If, on the other hand the point is no one should be able to access what you personally find objectionable then may I kindly say go to hell with less politeness than the previous poster? That’s not what we’re about around here, truly.)
I apologize for not reblogging him as much but everyone needs this on their dash daily. Seriously everyone needs this on their blog or wherever.
Do they rerun this anymore or no?
I simply walk past the bell ringers. Although I will happily give a few dollars to that dude with the electric guitar who plays amazing jams all year round.