Harrison the Fulgurite

| I am just some random dude with a way too active imagination and enough OCs to populate a small city | He/Him | Aegosexual | Of Adult Age in body, mind still has to catch up | Autistic adult and proud of it | I communicate almost exclusively through reaction images | If you message me, make your purpose for doing so clear, I will stonewall you until you do |

[lesvegas]

you can only reblog this if you're not racist

[towerologia-sideblog]

huge coming from the site who is so against black art that 'tumblr users are afraid of rap' has been a meme for the best part of a decade. You know that yall are 4channers with pronouns right?

[lesvegas]

addendum: you can only reblog this if you're not racist part 2

[the-haiku-bot]

addendum: you can

only reblog this if you’re

not racist part 2

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[lady-sapphyre]

[elexuscal]

The Good Place is an excellent show for many reasons, but one that doesn't really get talked about enough, probably because of how the season 1 twist obscures it, is that the 'No Exit'-esque "Hell is Other People" scenario for an afterlife of eternal torture is an avante garde experiment from an Auteur demon who's trying to convince the other demons of his Vision while they're like "idk man flaying genitals works really good"

[innerchildabortionclinic]

[innerchildabortionclinic]

fishcat morning everyone

[great-and-small]

Need y’all to know that in the 1970’s a letter to the editor was published in Daily Telegraph where the author offhandedly used the phrase “Tolkien-like gloom” to describe an area with barren trees and JRRT himself wrote back an incensed rebuttal at the use of his name in a context that suggested anything negative about trees.

[great-and-small]

“I feel that it is unfair to use my name as an adjective qualifying ‘gloom’, especially in a context dealing with trees. In all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemies”

He was like how dare you sir I am the biggest tree fan out there

[nerianasims]

A tree tried to eat the hobbits. Tom Bombadil had to save them. There's Mirkwood, "The Forest of Great Fear." I'm on the side of the writer of the letter to the editor.

[great-and-small]

Because Tolkien is Tolkien, he actually directly defended the actions of all his forests and trees in this same letter I’m referencing

[papaya-inspiration]

@businesstiramisu !!!!

[middle-earth-mythopoeia]

This is the best thing in the entire world. I love how much Tolkien loved trees and how fiercely he defended them. Here is a transcript:

Beautiful place because trees are loved From Prof. J.R.R. TOLKIEN SIR—with reference to your leader of June 29, I feel that it is unfair to use my name as an adjective qualifying “gloom,” especially in a context dealing with trees. In all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemies. Lothlorien is beautiful because there the trees were loved; elsewhere forests are represented as awakening to consciousness of themselves. The Old Forest was hostile to two-legged creatures because of the memory of many injuries. Fangorn Forest was old and beautiful, but at the time of the story tense with hostility because it was threatened by a machine-loving enemy. Mirkwood had fallen under the domination of a Power that hated all living things, but it was restored to beauty and became Greenwood the Great before the end of the story. It would be unfair to compare the Forestry Commission with Sauron because, as you observe, it is capable of repentance; but nothing it has done that is stupid compares with the destruction, torture and murder of trees perpetrated by private individuals and minor official bodies. The savage sound of the electric saw is never silent wherever trees are still found growing. J.R.R. TOLKIEN Merton College, Oxford

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Being a writer is so weird. You just go "hey I'm gonna invent a guy to emotionally devastate you with, who's in?" and people from all over the world are like "fuck yeah I'm in"

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

And then they yell at you. But they keep coming back.

[wtevrthefkiwant]

[yesornopolls]

if 4+ people corroborate that someone is a bad person, would you believe them without asking that person’s side of things?

just pondering how to go about a family thing

if 4+ people corroborate that someone is a bad person, would you believe them without asking that person’s side of things?

Yes

No

Remaining time: 6 days 18 hours

[autism-thoughts]

The anti-vax and anti-science propaganda is very real - and also, frankly I think doctors and nurses would've had an easier time getting people not to fall for it if they spent less time treating people like fucking shit

[autism-thoughts]

This post is about a lot of things but it is especially about racism, medical abuse, and eugenics

[ubercharge]

greenhouse gas (effect) gijinka whom a patron hired to stand and stare at you while slowly heating up the room (planet)

[what-even-is-thiss]

Listen guys witch hunts were bad but they weren’t a universal phenomenon in the past. Western Europeans and colonists just had a collective freak out for about a hundred years around the 17th and 18th centuries and then they mostly calmed down.

At the time Eastern Europe was also freaking out about vampires. Everybody was just having a rough century.

[what-even-is-thiss]

For most of its history the church’s (general) official stance on witches has been that they’re not real.

There was a hundred years or so there where people died and that was bad. Let me be clear. But it’s not a universal truth of living in a Christian region that somebody is gonna be burned for being a witch.

For one, a lot of people were hanged. Not burned. For two, most of the time people were shrimply not worried about them except for that time when they were.

[what-even-is-thiss]

And in our modern age we must remember the real enemy. McCarthyism.

[prismatic-bell]

Also a lot of people were accused and then just...not a lot happened. They were put on a ducking stool, or put in the stockade for a few hours, or driven through town on a cart and mocked (yes, the first half of that Monty Python scene is reasonably accurate. None of those are pleasant, mind you, but they're not death by a long shot. Sometimes the accused would be in court and be like "I pinky swear I didn't know I was doing a witchcraft, I'm sorry" and they'd be told "okay fine but you better go home and pray, like, a lot."

Also the throwing witches into a well thing is just fake. That is not a thing that happened. Most of the torture devices you've seen were invented by the Victorians to make the past seem more barbaric than it was. There was torture, but we're talking about the rack or the ducking stool. Even breaking on the wheel was a form of execution, not torture. (It was a pretty torturous execution, but you wouldn't do it expecting it to not be lethal, is what I mean.) Stuff like the iron maiden and the pear of anguish and chastity belts were all just...made up.

[zaprowsdower27]

The Spanish Inquisition was, however, real.

It was just looking for suspected secret Jews and Muslims with terrifying murderous fervor, rather than witches as a lot of people seem to think.

[fuckyeahladybug]

Open Thread: Wattpad Refugees

With the recent rumblings about censorship and work deletions on Wattpad, many users are considering posting to AO3 for the first time. If that describes you, you may have questions.

This post is a collection of resources you can use to start finding the answers to these questions. If you don’t find what you’re looking for at the links below or you have something more specific to ask, please feel welcome to post questions in the reblogs and comments here.

If you’re an AO3 pro answering questions in these notes, be kind. We were all new once, and other fans helped us then. It’s time to pay it forward.

Resources (under the cut)

How does AO3 work? What is and isn’t allowed?

My first recommendation for new users is always to skim the Terms of Service FAQ. It explains what AO3 allows and why in plain, straightforward terms. AO3 does not allow placeholder works, commercial content such as commissions links, or “work search” posts.

How can I change the look of the site?

The appearance of AO3 is very customizable! If you just want a basic dark mode, scroll down to the bottom of any page and click “Reversi” under the Customize menu. For more advanced customizations, I can’t recommend @ao3commentoftheday enough. They have so many gorgeous tutorials for everything from site skins to making the site’s content filters do whatever you want.

Wattpad users may especially appreciate the Floating Comment Box extension, which makes commenting on AO3 work slightly more like Wattpad.

How does AO3 search work?

This handy guide by @backofthebookshelf covers the basics. Here is a cheatsheet with more advanced searching tricks.

I’m ready to post my own works. How do I add [specific thing]?

With a little bit of HTML, you can do some incredibly neat things in an AO3 work. Here’s the website running Doom. Here is a very comprehensive guide to Limited HTML on AO3. It may look intimidating at first, but you can get a lot done by copying and pasting and paying attention to the results. As a fun bonus, check out the rest of the series, which includes step by step instructions for making your fic look like text messages on a phone screen, newspaper articles, sticky notes, and more.

Why is Wattpad doing this now? Have similar things happened before?

Fandom creatives have been outrunning purges and legal threats for a long time. Here is a comprehensive timeline of fandom purges and legal actions taken against fanworks, from 1977 to the present day. Here is another timeline written by @olderthannetfic, with associated commentary from other fans.

Purges on LiveJournal and other sites circa 2007 influenced the founding of AO3. You can read in detail about the circumstances of its founding and the construction of the policies it abides by today here.

If you read this far, I’m proud of you. Migrating to a new site is always hard, and there’s so much grief when archives purge content without warning. Welcome to AO3. We’re glad to have you. 🤝

[olderthannetfic]

It's not the first site to turn on fandom, and it won't be the last.

At least AO3 makes it easy to find things, no matter how old or obscure.

Check out the fandom index by media type and try going directly to your fandom's tag or a ship or another tag and using the sidebar filters. AO3 does have a search box and even an advanced search, but those are less of a default compared to Wattpad and other sites.

[headspace-hotel]

Wtf happening with wattpad?

[madam-melon-meow]

@headspace-hotel they updated their policies and changed what content is permissible. You can find the entire update here:

Wattpad Policies

my friend @orangestorapples made a pretty decent summary, see below

They no longer allow works:

- Created primarily for sexual arousal

- Exploitative or harmful

- Intended to shock, glorify harm, or promote hate

For their updated sexual content policies, they do not allow:

- Pornographic content (created primarily for sexual arousal)

- Any sexual content involving minors.

- Sexual exploitation, coercion, or non-consensual acts that are glorified

- Sexual roleplay, solicitation, or messaging

- Illegal sex acts in violation of applicable local and international laws, including but not limited to, bestiality, necrophilia, incest, or child sexual exploitation and abuse material

For their updated violent content policies, they do not allow:

- Content created primarily to shock or glorify harm

- Gratuitous or prolonged violence that doesn't support the broader narrative

For their updated Self-Harm and Suicide content policies, they allow:

- General, non-graphic references

- Stories that explore self-harm or suicide in a responsible, story-driven way

- Recovery, survival, or awareness-focused narratives

And do not allow:

- Graphic depictions

- Content that encourages, instructs, or glorifies self-harm or suicide

For their updated Real-World Harm and Extremism content policies, they do not allow:

- Glorification or support of real-world violence, hate groups, or extremist ideologies

- Content that promotes or imitates real-world harmful acts or actionable plans/steps on how to commit violent acts, illegal acts, or organize real-world violent crimes

For their updated Self-Expression and Sensitive Topics content policies, they allow:

- Survival stories that offer a sense of hope or support

- Could contain graphic descriptions

- Stories referencing or describing sensitive topics, in a non-glorifying way

And do not allow:

- Content that normalizes or glorifies harmful behavior

- Content where harmful acts are presented as desirable or rewarding

[olderthannetfic]

Sadly, as we all know, these types of rules are very much in the eye of the beholder and tend to get enforced in ways the community finds absurd.

Recovery story but gay? Must be for titillation!

Sexy shifter romance that has an actual plot? Someone was a little too wolf-like one time out of three hundred chapters, so it's nothing but doggy porn!

etc.

I'm sure we can all sympathize with the part of their motivation that was "Stop posting your Nazi shit on our site!", but on a massive site with an unending queue of reported content to deal with, broad "don't post bad stuff" policies just end up causing tons of grudge reporting and auto-moderation by AI and bad judgment calls on all kinds of things the rules theoretically do allow.

I don't know where the people writing dark romance they want to monetize should go. Not Wattpad, clearly, but most of the commercially-focused options are overrun with AI and extra unpleasant commercialization.

If you write fanfic or strictly non-commercial original works you want a non-algorithm-y, non-paying community around, just come to AO3.

[nemeyuko]

Sadly the eclipse wasn’t near me this time around so I had to improvise

[future-crab]

So I follow N. D. Stevenson (comics writer and animator, most famous for Nimona and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power) and his husband Lee Ostertag (also a comics writer and animator) on Instagram. When I started following them, they were both publicly presenting as women, and then a few years ago N. D. came out as transmasc nonbinary, and then earlier this year Lee also came out as transmasc. Anyway this is all setup to say that Lee had the chance to make the funniest post of all time and he took it:

Absolutely iconic.

[fearoftheminotaur]

I want to throw in that part of the context behind this meme was N.D. talking about how he sometimes gets hatemail for marrying a man as a former lesbian, and how many people seem to think he divorced his wife.

I have not managed to find anyone who thinks that in the wild, but it is so damn funny.

[jasontoddsguns]

“Boromir apologist” he doesn’t have anything to apologize for????? He fell victim to evil ringTM like once. and then immediately redeemed himself. Guys come on.

[prokopetz]

Doug Jones and Danny DeVito in a buddy comedy about a couple of elderly former henchmen unwillingly dragged out of retirement for one last caper. There's a running gag where they claim to be the original duo that the "one of them is short and fat and the other is tall and thin" trope is based on.

[prokopetz]

Playing against the trope's conventions (but to the actors' respective strengths), DeVito's character is the talkative one while Jones' character hardly says a word. The former argues that popular media always has it the other way 'round due to prejudice against short people.

[spiritbladed]

something something extremely sexy when magic users resort to physical violence. yeah i have the power of god and anime on my side but i also have THESE HANDS. i cast Punch You In The Face. i take my magic staff through which i channel the vast energies of the elements and the cosmos and i cast Severe Concussion And Skull Fracture. casting time for xenoglossy too long, chose the quicker route of Stab You In The Throat.