it was always you

I've been here too long

[fireproof-larry]

Louis at Antwerpen, Belgium

19 April 2026

[burntheedges]

me to my husband: ao3 is down again [explains outage]

my husband: someone should write a spicy fic about the two database engineers locked in the server room trying to fix it

my husband, smug: there was only one spreadsheet 😎

[striving-artist]

Do you have any idea how conflicted we would be if we found out that the archive stayed down several extra hours because two engineers were having a forced proximity coworkers pwp event in the server room? That’s the dream. That’s what we write about. But they’re getting in the way of reading it. They would become the most controversial ship within seconds. They’d double the goncharov index within days. They would become our gods.

[soulwriter-sp]

shoutout to AO3 authors who write 100k fics for free while juggling mental illness, academic burnout, 3 jobs, and a deep-rooted need to fix fictional people.

[veeaziel]

every day i am percieved™️

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

There is a reason for this though!

The original tweet summarizes it pretty well. Fanfic tends to be popular among certain types of neurodivergent people (aka people most likely to read excessively as a child, and have burnout as an adult) for the same reasons that we tend to hyperfixate–neurochemical signaling (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly). What I mean is, for people who are really dependent on changes in dopamine/serotonin/neurotransmitter levels, who have low levels or wonky neural reward systems (perhaps the most common types of neurodivergence)…people like us rely on dependable external sources of those neurochemicals. In order to function, we spend a lot of our free time trying to level out our brain chemistry using things that can reliably bring us a steady stream of joyful moments (rewards) without costing too much of the mental effort that is already in short supply. 

significantly: the investment of reading has to be balanced with a steady “return on investment”–and this return has to start fairly quickly. because again, we don’t have a lot of attention/energy to invest on tiring things. we have perpetual “low batteries” in that regard.

that doesn’t mean these stories are “simple,” or that they lack complexity or value–only that the reward has to come in short regular intervals, and it has to have a low “upfront cost.” these stories are only “easy” to read in the sense that the effort we put into them is rewarded in a timely manner. which is why fanfic stories are so perfectly formulated for neurodivergent readers–they are often beautifully written, but skip a lot of the upfront costs (of introducing new characters, of world-building, of getting the audience emotionally connected to the story elements).

the nature of fanfiction is that the reader has a pre-existing relationship with this world and these characters. that–combined with the shorter average length of fics–means that fan fics very quickly start rewarding the reader in a way that traditional fiction struggles to. that’s not a bad thing! and maybe it’s something more traditionally published writers should be paying attention to.

Fanfic, as a genre, has been uniquely helpful and accessible to many neurodivergent readers who would otherwise struggle to immerse themselves in stories. I’m glad so many of you have found a way to love and enjoy reading again! The important thing is that you are spending time inside stories you love–the way those stories are published or presented to the world is just one detail. The fact that you find joy in the process of reading (or listening!) to stories–that is what matters.

[attackofjak]

I feel understood 🥰

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

a bunch of people have reblogged this with the default “i feel called out” reaction….and i know when we say that we mean it tongue-in-cheek….but this comment sorta blew my mind & shifted my perspective up and to the left a little thank you♥

[zadabug98]

The Serotonin is stored in the Ao3

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

The Serotonin is stored in the Ao3

[kizo2703]

#this 100% happened to me#but i’m a middle aged writer and english teacher with an academic literature background#when i burned out got sick and had a breakdown i couldn’t read regular books anymore i could only read fanfic#i saw on twitter where someone said literature is prescriptive. you read the kind of fiction that fits your personal need#we’re all overwhelmed right now and that’s why we like the tropey fiction whether fanfic or romance novels or superhero movies#we UNDERSTAND the rules of fiction and dont’ have to work to understand while the payoff comes quickly. kiss. hea. battle/victory

[depressedfandomfatty]

The important thing for me and why fanfic is so much easier is I can pick for my mood.

I can pick a hurt comfort or a slow burn or an angst with a happy ending.

I can remove the tags I don’t want to see, I can check word count,check if it’s finished and it’s so much easier than books

I know these characters and I see them in my mind so they can pull me on journey into a world I love, unless it’s au universes

Tagging fics and sorting them into a system I can deal with, oh yeah and it’s also free so there is that.

[partywithponies]

[partywithponies]

[duskydestra]

Happy birthday to AO3 🎂🎉

[correctopinionhaver]

[transformativeworks]

AO3 Celebrates 16 Million Fanworks

AO3 has reached 16 million fanworks! Celebrate this milestone with us, and learn more about the technical setup of the site at https://otw-news.org/s486vdeb

[moonchild311]

"people who stay up at night are either insomniac or In love" people who stay up at night read gay fanfiction on AO3 what are you on about?

[nomorezerocomments]

"commenting is hard i never know what to say" this is an actual comment i left on a fic last night

you can literally write anything you want

[moon-sun-thyme]

Louis‘ bitter sweet lemonade 🍋

[hshouse]

where is my larry roadtrip series tho cause that would break netflix

[howdididisco]

happy birthday to the tweet that changed every larrie's life

[stephron]

Visited the AIMH tweet to pay my respects.

[lamusebrune]

I cannot stress enough how important it is to do silly, frivolous things that serve no other purpose than making you happy.

[walk-up-songs]

Bought my uncle a burger and milkshake in exchange for letting me disrupt the holiest day of the week, NFL Sunday Football, so I could install a Pi-hole and free the household of ads...the thing abt the specific boomers I live with is they told me not to trust people on the Internet but they do not understand the algorithm or online advertising and think that Facebook has their best interests at heart. And every time I have tried to explain to them that no, blorbo from my dashboard is not selling my kidneys on the dark web but Google from your capitalism is definitely selling your web searches to every advertising company on the planet, they think I am paranoid. How could their personal friend Mark Zuckerberg want anything bad to happen to them etc. I am fighting battles I did not know existed!!!

[walk-up-songs]

Update I have had Pi-Hole successfully installed for two (2) hours and have since learned that 40% of the web traffic in this household went to advertisements. FORTY FUCKING PERCENT. We live in hell. This is the greatest gift I have ever given my family that they will not understand or acknowledge or feel any gratitude for.

[walk-up-songs]

Update #2: it was rising all night but the number it finally settled on was...60%. 60% of the web traffic in this household went to advertisements. I can't tell if this high number is bc I live in Silicon Valley and probably am subject to the Algorithmic Internet in ways people outside of Silicon Valley are not or it is normal to have 2/3rds of your web traffic be ads, but it did make me set up a recurring donation of the EFF lmfao.

[walk-up-songs]

Okay I have had multiple people ask, so here are the useful websites that me and Beryl used to muddle our way through:

Using Pi-hole and Raspberry Pi (on the Raspberry Pi website, really good overview of what Pi-hole does)

Tumblr-archived Twitter thread about one household's experience with Pi-hole (this is what sold me on it. Also the tweets were published in 2022 and Pi-hole is actively being developed, so I think some of the teething problems he mentioned might have cleared up or are at least being addressed.)

Pi-hole website (gives broad strokes of the software and imho is not actually that helpful, however this proves that I am not making shit up)

Pi-hole documentation (read prerequisites carefully, you do NOT need the newest model of Raspberry Pi to run this thing!! You don't even need a Raspberry Pi at all, you can run it on a bunch of Linux systems however I'm very stupid when it comes to Linux and when my options are install and learn a whole ass new OS or spend $$ on a Raspberry Pi and hook it up to my TV with a wired mouse and keyboard I will unfortunately be spending money)

Privacy International's guide to setting up Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi (bro this one saved our asses)

You guys can ask me questions if you want but I guarantee I will not know the answers bc I don't know shit about fuck, I just followed the directions and reaped the rewards. It did take us 2 hours to set up bc I'm bad at following directions (and it's kind of complicated if you've been out of the software game for a while like I have), and you do have to be sososo brave about fucking around with your internet provider's configuration. So make sure you eat before you do it!! However it has been so worth it for me so far, given that now all my devices at home are running faster and I'm not seeing any ads while web browsing. We will see what complaints my family comes up with, but I love it so far.

Also!! if you've never heard of Raspberry Pi, which I realize are not all of my followers are lost in the Silicon Valley sauce so you might not have, here's is their website and their page for using Raspberry Pi at home.

(And here is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that fights for digital privacy, free speech, and innovation, if you, like me, were presented with cold hard data about your personal internet usage and suddenly realized that our internet is fully a dystopia. haha.)

[acquitarte]

After a few months with pi-hole, I recently switched to AdGuard Home. It was recommended/is co-promoted in a pi-hole discord server, and it seems to be blocking a bit more successfully/consistently for me than the pi-hole did.

I also use Blokada on my phone when I'm not home and have the Windscribe browser extension which includes 10GB of free VPN traffic and has uBlock integrated into it. (AdGuard does technically make things that do this but I like those better; ymmv).

It all takes some setup and tinkering, but I highly, highly recommend taking steps to clear out some of the internet garbage and protect your info.

[minyicho]

starting a collection of my favourite AO3 author’s notes

honourable mentions