Fangirl Underground

Multi-Fandom Positivity // Twitter: fangirluground / Pillowfort & Dreamwidth: fangirlunderground / Discord: fangirlangela #2181 // (Angela, She/Her, 36)

[beomie-rabbit]

Avengers bring u the 6th December

[fandomtrumpshate]

FTH 2019 Auction

Hi all,

The new tumblr shakeup caught us on the cusp of announcing our calendar for 2019 and some of the new procedures we are implementing this coming year. Even though a bunch of stuff is still in flux, we want to get this basic information out there as quickly as possible, while most people are still on tumblr to see it.

****Please reblog far and wide.**** We don’t know when we’ll have another chance to reach a lot of people again quickly. 1) Who are you guys, again?

We are a handful of fans who came together, in the wake of the 2016 election, to throw together an auction to support some of the organizations that would fight against the Trump administration. By another accounting, we are the hundreds of fans who have participated in the last two auctions to raise over $50,000 for organizations like Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, ProPublica and the Trevor Project. You can read more about us on the About Us page linked at the top of our blog. We are still finalizing our list of supported organizations for the year, but we will post that list shortly. 2) Where will the auction be hosted? How can I find you?

Like everyone else, we’re not totally sure where we are going to land. We have our own freestanding site in production, but it won’t be ready for this coming year (in part because we hadn’t thought we would need it yet!) Our plan for now is to host this year’s auction at dreamwidth. You can find us at dreamwidth under the name fandomtrumpshate.

That being said, we are still taking suggestions: if you know of a platform that is particularly well-suited to running an auction, please leave a comment on this post.

Even if we end up running the auction from a different site, we will make sure that you can always use the DW page to find us quickly and easily.

We have also started a twitter account for auction announcements. Our handle is – you guessed it – FandomTrumpsHate. 3) When is the 2019 auction taking place?

We will post further information about auction logistics in a couple of days, but here is the basic calendar. Sunday, January 6th: creator signups open. As in years past, we are inviting people to contribute one (or more!) of five kinds of fanwork: fic, art, vids, podfics, or fan labor. Friday, February 1st: creator signups close. Monday, February 18th: Browsing week begins. This is a new addition to our calendar! We’ve learned that many participants from the past two years, creators and bidders both, feel that a week is too long for an auction. So instead, we’re giving potential bidders a full week to look over all the offerings and decide what interests them, and then shortening the bidding period itself.

Tuesday, February 25th, 8pm EST: Bidding opens Friday, March 1st, 8pm EST: Bidding closes Friday, March 8th, 8pm EST: proof of donation due from winning bidders 4) Why are we still doing this FTH thing? Blue wave, amirite? It’s true that American voters turned out in record numbers this November to vote for democrats (or against republicans.) But the 45 administration’s attacks against immigrants, refugees, women, people of color, non-Christians, members of the press, and the operations of democracy itself are only getting fiercer – and the organizations that are fighting back need our support as badly as ever. Since our last auction at the beginning of 2018 (and we wish we could link you to sources here, but all of these stories are easily googled):

* ICE has created inhumane detention camps for asylum speakers, separated infants and toddlers from their parents, seized and imprisoned American citizens of color on the suspicion of being undocumented, and beaten to death a trans woman in their custody. And if that weren’t enough, US troops at the border have committed war crimes by firing tear gas across an international border in order to deter a caravan of asylum-seekers, including young children. 

FTH stands with refugees, asylum-speakers, and undocumented immigrants, supporting organizations like RAICES and the Young Center. * Hate crimes of many kinds have risen across the country, including the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre and individual attacks against Muslims, Sikhs, and LGBTQ+ people.

FTH continues to stand in solidarity with the vulnerable people threatened by the Trump administration, and to provide support to the organizations that offer support and fight for their rights. * Democrats’ electoral victories fell far short of the actual level of support they received from the electorate. Significant gerrymandering meant that, in many states, Republicans maintained control of state and federal offices in spite of being significantly outvoted across the state as a whole. Furthermore, active voter suppression campaigns in Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida (among others) prevented hundreds of thousands of poor and minority voters from making their voices heard. In states where the Republican party was unable to retain legislative or gubernatorial control, outgoing lawmakers are passing laws and signing executive orders to strip power away from their successors, and hastily approving vast numbers of judicial appointments to lock in conservative judges.

This year, FTH joins the fight for every voice by supporting organizations that fight voter suppression and gerrymandering and seek to reinstate the Voting Rights Act. So yes, we’re still doing this. We hope you’ll keep doing it, too. This is a long fight, and it’s far from over. it’s going to take all of us.

[fandomtrumpshate]

Oops, quick correction… our twitter handle is FansTrumpHate. find us (and follow us) there!

[faficowrimo]

Every chapter. Every one shot. Every drabble. Every ficlet. Whether it’s on a personal website, a blog, or an archive. Whether you’ve read it a hundred times before or you’re reading it for the first time. Whether the fic was posted years ago or minutes ago. Whether you sign your name or leave your thoughts anonymously. Whether your comment is paragraphs in length or a few short words. Comment on every fanfic you read and enjoy in the month of January.

[garnet-runestar]

It’s about time I post up a post with my Zelda cosplay in it. I worked and reworked this dress for years. I made the patterns for it when the game was first announced. It’s been an absolute labor of love! I’m so proud of how it turned out! If you have questions about how I made this cosplay (and for more pictures!), please check out my facebook: www.Facebook.com/garnetrunestar

[fangirlunderground-blog]

Cosplay Fav of the Week

[kohquette]

✨✨✨ Special Korrasami collaboration print with @jenbartel available at Rose City Comic Con (Portland, OR) next week! ✨✨✨

If there are any left over after the con, we’ll throw ‘em up for sale on Jen’s web store after NYCC. Wahoo!

[fangirlunderground-blog]

Fanart Faves of the Week 3/3

[nobledemons]

Smile!

[fangirlunderground-blog]

Fanart Faves of the Week 2/3

[juvenile-reactor]

Pull the trigger Connor

Connor don’t

[fangirlunderground-blog]

Fanart Faves of the Week 1/3

[rex-luscus]

Hey guys

Remember LJ icons?

They were TINY. 100x100 pixels. That’s, like, digital scrimshaw. And people were obsessed with making good ones - and there were CONTESTS, super cutthroat ones, and trends would sweep the icon-making world every week or so and as soon as you mastered a technique it would be passé, and there were whole communities dedicated to tutorials and icon-making resources, and it was all its own WEIRD LITTLE WORLD.

Is there anything like that now? What do graphics-obsessed people make in the Tumblr era?

[sailorstkwrning]

If there is one thing I miss about LJ it’s the shadow-conversations people used to have in comment threads solely with their icons. Icons had a vocabulary, and a grammar, and you had to learn it.

Gif sets: not quite used the same way.

[rex-luscus]

Right! It was a whole different dynamic because you could choose which icon to post with. So it would be like “I’m wearing my Severus Snape with a Weird Al song quote mask to say this.”

[kdazrael]

FLASHBACK MAAAAAN.

For a year or two I had a paid LJ account and I remember being actively excited about the EXTRA ICON SLOTS. I would be able to express myself with a wider array of Thor and Batman reaction images!

[akiyty]

a friend and i once had a conversation that went to, iirc, something like 6 pages of comments, just the two of us, only with out icons

[katiegeeks]

100x100 pixels wasn’t scrimshaw on the monitors we were using. It was a totally reasonable percentage of screen space in the resolutions we had at the time.

[bankuei]

Icons were your mood indicator, emoticon and gif rolled into one.  I actually miss having multiple icons to choose from.

[fangirlunderground-blog]

Speaking of... I think we’re missing an opportunity to discuss the CUSTOM MOOD ART. Especially the ones that used tiny screencaps or gifs for each mood. It took a looooot of ingenuity to make some of those moods fit a scene.

Like, shit, how do I find a picture of Agent Skully looking “quixotic.”

And then after all that work, nobody ever seems more than 10% of them because how often do you feel “exanimate” instead of just “tired” or lazy” really?

[fangirlunderground-blog]

Hi! I am not on Tumblr but am bluebloodbruise on ao3. My Hannibal fic was recced by you but now the tag disappeared on ao3. Things are so crazy in fandom/tumblr so i dont know if this was intentional? It made me sad :( thank you for your time. Aurora

Oh no! I’m so sorry, I deleted the collection because I hadn’t updated it with recent recs in months, and most people weren’t approving, so I was worried I was doing something wrong or annoying. I didn’t even think anyone would notice, I’m very sorry!!!

I abbbbsolutely still stand by all the recs I’ve made. I’m just keeping them in my own bookmarks now tagged #FangirlRecs and marked as recs, though there are a few I have to add that were made by my friend and guest reccer.

If people want me to remake the collection I’m happy to do so. I just want to do it in a way that gives the authors more control (that was the main complaint I got) and I’m honestly not quite sure how.

[roxolotl-remaking-deactivated20]

Look i dont wanna sound like a Fandom Mom or whatever but what do you think women over 25 or so are supposed to do? Do u really think theyre supposed to drop all their interests and just talk about taxes and marriage or whatever? It seems like 25+ year old fanboys do not receive this kind of “ooh cringe” reaction either. There are guys in their 40s with comic book collections and shit and people might think theyre a nerd at worst, not a freak who shouldnt be trusted

[fangirlunderground-blog]

Thank you. Because, here’s the thing, I literally tried that. And this sounds really dramatic but it kind of ruined my life for a long time.

Once I got out of grad-school and started working, at exactly age 25, I figured it was time to get serious because I was “too old for this stuff” and frankly I was afraid of being judged. 

I sold all my comics, I stopped reading fanfiction, I stopped playing video games. All of it. It’s not that I never, ever watched anything “geeky” or spent a weekend binge-reading a kink-meme, but when I did, it was rare and I’d feel guilty about it like it was time wasted. I’d keep it all to myself, you know? And without any kind of inspiration, I eventually stopped drawing. After all, I didn’t need it for my “serious job,” so why bother? Unfortunately, my former skill is so atrophied now it’s nearly lost, but worse than that, it’s stressful now instead of the thing I loved to do for most of my life.

What was I doing instead? Well, I’d work my miserable, toxic job, come home and worry about how far behind everyone else I was, and how weird I was compared to all my colleagues. I’d go out with people and do the things they liked doing, but I only pretended to. But I’m not great at that and pretending to be someone else ate me alive. Unsurprisingly, by 31, my anxiety and depression was not in a great place, and I fuckin’ snapped. Not just because of this stuff, of course, but it honestly contributed. I quit my job and left town.

Suddenly I was completely alone, no job, no friends, and no reason to pretend to be someone else. So, I started doing all the things I’d given up. I read all the fanfiction I wanted, I bought a Playstation and an SNES and played them for hours. I bought back every comic book I loved, watched every Marvel movie I missed, and caught up on my favorite characters. I started traveling around just going to cons for the first time (NYCC, GeekGirlCon, DragonCon, etc). In fact, at @geekgirlcon and DragonCon especially, I saw groups of women who were 60+, just fucking enjoying things, and it made me feel so much better about my future. I’m not even joking, I literally cry every time I think about it, because I never realized how scared I was about aging in a world that thinks I’m already a decade too old for the things I love. Suddenly, that wasn’t so scary. 

And then I just stopped pretending that I wasn’t into this stuff. I mean all of it, even the stuff no one understand, even the stuff people openly make fun of, even smutty fanfiction. 

And look, I’m not saying this cured my depression, or that everything is perfect. For one, I picked a city that’s awful for geeks and I’m trying to figure out where to move and how. For another, I lost six years of making like-minded friends, and it’s hard to find them now because we’re all so worried about being judged and online – the space that was always a refuge for me as a loner weirdo growing up – is now apparently a Children of the Corn. But I’m happier here, actually fucking liking things, than being the unobjectionable robot woman I’m apparently supposed to be. 

I don’t expect anyone to actually be interested in this, or have gotten this far, but because I’m having feelings about turning 36 on Monday, I just want to tell anyone who is about to turn 25 that you should just tell people to go fuck themselves. It’s your life. You’re going to offend people no matter what you do, at least choose the direction that makes you happiest, because those people certainly aren’t going to pay for your fucking therapist bills, are they? 🦖

[taraljc]

This is gonna sound weird to you guys, but when I first started writing fanfic and sending stories to fanzines to be published back in 1991, in my first fandom all of the fans and writers and editors and readers I met were shocked that I was 17 because they were all in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. I was the outlier. I was an aberration.

Wanna know when young people started discovering fandom en masse? In the mid 1990s, when AOL got their internet gateway.

All the folks who ran fannish mailing lists and conventions and published ‘zines and posted fanfic online were over 18, because email and IRC and Usenet and FTP sites and listservs were primarily used by adults because they were almost exclusively college students, government employees, and academics. And the users of gated communities like BBS, GEnie, Compuserv, and AOL all skewed older. Only Prodigy was actually aimed at kids, because prior to the mid-to-late 1990s, children weren’t getting online until they went to university.

And what kids found was the fandom that adults had built online, after being a part of it offline for decades.

Even when FFN was launched, the people who initially posted there were the same people who had been posting fanfic to the internet for a decade: THE GROWN-UPS.

So the idea that we’re meant to put away childish things is hilarious, cos for most of our lives, fandom was not a part of our childhoods. It was a part of our everyday adult lives.

[caledoniaseries]

There’s a passage in Stranger in a Strange Land I always loved. The book (and the passage in its entirety) is unrelentingly sexist in a million ways, but I’ve never forgotten this part:

…there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart…

[sylphidine]

:::raises hand:::

I cut my teeth on Prodigy bulletin boards in 1994.

I moved to Delphi Forums in 1997.  Then I was simultaneously on Beehive, ProBoards, and LiveJournal.

And then I was stupid and thought I had to be a grownup, and turned all my online platforms, mainly Facebook and LinkedIn, into professional ones, and cut off my creative outlets, and suffered just like @fangirlunderground.

And then I resurrected myself on Tumblr under the pen name I’ve been using since high school, and I’ve never looked back.

[fangirlunderground-blog]

Oh my god. Prodigy. How did I forget that!?

[copperbadge]

Zero Comment Challenge

So, @polizwrites came up with the Zero Comment Challenge, which is to find a fic on AO3 that has no comments but deserves some and leave a nice comment. I think this is a fantastic idea so I try to do at least one a week, and I’ve gotten permission from polizwrites to start my own thread of them :) 

If you want to join in, you can go to the AO3 search page, choose a ship or character or fandom, filter however you’d like, and enter “00″ in the comments field near the bottom (it needs two zeroes!). But I’m also going to be linking my searches in case people want a prefabricated search!  

Every five weeks I reset this list to zero, but if you want to see my previous searches you can check the Zero Comment Challenge tag. You should also feel free to reblog this post with a link to your own search. (Just execute the search and copy the URL of the results page!)

Want to comment but not sure how to start? Check out 101 Comment Starters or the LLF Comment Builder!

[cassiesinsanity]

You know what? Someone fell upon one of my Sharon Carter ficlets because of this (it had like, 10 views and no kudos and had been up for about three months) and they left a sweet little comment and it was the best fannish thing I ever received.

SMOOCHES to all the zero comment commenters. You’re the best!

[copperbadge]

What a lovely story. I’m so glad you got a nice comment! 

You guys, your comments MAKE A DIFFERENCE. You encourage content creators and make them feel loved! 

[destinationtoast]

User response to announcement of new Tumblr community guidelines

This is a super quick visualization of the tags most commonly co-occurring with #tumblr on Tumblr since the announcement. 

Obviously, not everyone posting about the new guidelines is using the tag #tumblr!  (I also checked a few other tags like #tumblr purge and #female presenting nipples, and I saw similar tags co-occurring, but there are undoubtedly lots of posts responding to the new community guidelines that don’t use any of these tags.)  And obviously not every post using the tag #tumblr are responding to the recent events; there are plenty of apparently unrelated topics in the tag cloud.  

Data is taken from past 3 days; min 25 posts co-occurring; max 992 posts co-occurring (#staff).  I didn’t combine any tags, so there are a lot of similar variants (e.g., of “December 17” and “flagged”). 

A few more tags/variants that didn’t fit: ifttt, community guidelines, tumblr guidelines, tumblr problems, tumblrpocalypse, female-presenting nipples, dec 17th.

If I had more time, I’d look at what had most co-occurred with the #tumblr tag prior to Dec 3, for comparison.  Maybe soon!

[meeedeee]

I want to like that archive team that's been posting about archiving NSFW blogs, but my spam-email-recognizing instincts are telling me not to trust anyone with such poor spelling and grammar. Is it just me...?

Yep, it is just you. They’ve been doing this for….decades? Helped save parts of Geocities, FortuneCity, Fandom Wank and thousands of other non-fannish websites. They are awesome.

But you can always get off your judgmental ass and start helping. Like Garfield* who is offering to help people backup blogs for free. Or @not-freyja​ who is submitting each URL - one by one - to the WBM to save @spockslash  

*If you need help archiving a blog, Garfield, a fan vidder, is offering to use the Python install on their machine do it for free.

edited: cough, my hand slipped on the save button. I have a typing disability so you will see lots of typos in my posts unless I spend minutes fixing them. 

[ao3datafan]

Breathe, We’ve Been Here Before (An Open Letter to Fandom)

Take a deep breath, we’ve been here before. I joined fandom online in 2001 and since then have been an active engager with fandom communities as a fanfiction writer. In my seventeen years as a member of the online fandom community, I’ve been through two other similar purges – the Lemon War and Strikethrough. In 2003, Fanfiction.net decided to purge all NC-17 content from its website due to pressure from advertisers. In response, the websites Mediaminer.org and Adultfanfiction.net were created to fill the void. AFF itself was a direct response to the 2003 purge known as the Lemon War. In 2007, again due to pressure from advertisers, Livejournal removed blogs and communities that were tagged with “problematic” tags such as rape, abuse, and incest. In the process of deleting MUCH of then-fandoms existence in this unannounced purge, Livejournal also deleted survivor’s groups and a community of online support for sexuality and trauma recovery. Dreamwidth was created in response to Strikethrough, while the Organization for Transformative Works was founded in 2007 during fandom’s “Never Again” moment with the goal of offering safety and haven for displaced fanworks.

You may know OTW by it’s flagship project, Archive of Our Own, which this blog studies for fun, but OTW is also instrumental in the protection and engagement of fandom communities in the larger world. OTW’s legal team regularly writes articles to courts of law defending fandom communities from copywrite law as fair use, and defends fandom communities from poorly written and inept laws that restrict fandom’s ability to participate in transformative culture. Your memes, your fanfiction, and your fanart are all examples of things that OTW serves to protect. When you donate to OTW, you not only keep AO3 alive and free from advertisements and commercialization, you also provide support to OTW’s legal services and their myriad other projects such as Fanlore and Transformative Works and Cultures (disclaimer – the paper I’m writing currently is for TWC).

Breathe; we’ve been here before. Several times in fact. It’s been 11 years since the last major fandom purge happened so I know for many younger members of fandom it can feel scary and overwhelming, but fandom will survive; fandom will recover. However, Strikethrough and the Lemon War left scars on fandom, scars that Tumblr’s purge will also leave. Whole communities will be lost and scattered to the winds. Friendships will change, and the online nature of fandom will be irrevocably shaped by the fall of yet another community. However, just as this is not the first time, this is also not the last time. As long as commercialization of fandom exists, we will continually be chased from our homes on the internet and need to find new homes. But we have persisted in the past and we will persist again.

Like many of you I am disappointed by Tumblr’s decision to wipe out “NSFW” content via an auto filter that seems to think my alternative fashion posts are porn (really???), but I am unsurprised. I knew this day would come, and I’ve wondered for a long time when fandom would leave and where it would go. The answer to the first question has come, but I’m not sure where we will go. However, wherever fandom makes its new home, I will follow, because fandom is my family and my home.

Thank you to all my followers and my apologies to you – in light of Tumblr’s decision to ban NSFW content and in solidarity with the affected blogs and members of fandom, AO3DataFan will no longer update on Tumblr. My current plan is to move to Pillowfort for the time being after the start of the new year. However, wherever the majority of fandom lands, I will follow and AO3DataFan will return.

Over the next few weeks, I will be archiving posts, answering asks, and preparing for the purge. You will see answered asks for DataFan questions simply saying “Acknowledged” to let you know that I have seen your ask and am planning to answer it in the future on the new website.

In the meantime, if you need to contact me or want to ask a question, I can be reached via email ([email protected]) or on Discord (lockea#2638).

Breathe; I know this is an uncertain time for many of you, but take it from a fandom elder – we have been here before, we will be here again, and we will always survive. Somehow, some way.

All my love,

Lockea Stone

[fangirlunderground-blog]

Where to find me

None of these have posts yet, and I’m not sure how I’m going to use them all yet, but to make this easier here’s everything.

Twitter: fangirluground (u not under)

Pillowfort: fangirlunderground

Dreamwidth: fangirlunderground

Discord: fangirlangela #2181

As I said earlier, please feel free to share your contacts with me. For the record I’m not deleting anything here, or on my sideblogs.

[fangirlunderground-blog]

I’m not going into PF to start following people until the weekend but I’ve been collecting usernames. In the meantime, here’s this again 💛

[fanhackers]

Tumblrpocalypse Special, Part 2

As the Tumblrpocalypse unfolds, we’re collecting both personal and scholarly reactions from fan studies scholars and Tumblr researchers. Here are some thoughts from Ruth Flaherty, PhD Candidate in Intellectual Property and Economics, UEA Law School. You can find Ruth on Twitter at @RuthFlahertyUEA.

“I think this raises several important questions. Firstly, regarding the life cycle of these sites, and who they think their users/customers are - who is it they are trying to protect with this move, and what customer research have they done to state that this is necessary? Like others, I think that this will affect LGBTQ+ users disproportionately - but I also see it as part of the ongoing movement of large hosting sites (other than AO3 of course) away from material that could be considered ‘harmful’ to the underlying work - for example for copyright reasons (see the suggested new Article 13 in the Proposed Copyright Directive in the EU). I see this as part of the increasing number of threats to fan communities who don’t interact with each other or the underlying work in the ‘authorised’ way.”

[alyseofwonderland]

The only real answer to the fandom purges is to give AO3 all the money so they can make us a blogging site as well.