The Blog is on Semi-Hiatus

・Blank・Bodily 18↑・An/Anon or They/Them・ System/Plural/&・LGBTQIA+ / MOGAI Inclusionist ・Neurodivergent・Queer・Disabled・POC・ Anti-Harrasment/Censorship・Pro-Kink/Choice 〘 Useful reading links: https://www.fujoshi.info , https://tinyurl.com/fandomadvice , https://tinyurl.com/CSASurvivorsAndKink , https://twitter.com/outliersgeorg/status/1154632646082748416?t=cKxvltFR1CKdzZLO_C9PJw&s=19 , https://twitter.com/ZeebDemon/status/1423415020029837313?t=fi1NjZdjP-kQD3zY7vroOg&s=19 〙

[catchymemes]

[cardenvondraken]

My favourite experience with buying honey was when I pulled up to the address given and it was just a regular house in the suburbs. It was a nice day, so I drove with the windows down. I was about to text the person and verify the address when 4 or 5 bees flew into my car. I was like “ok this is the place” and got out. I was escorted to the door by about 10 of them.

[thetomska]

tumblr i’m begging you please let me reblog the big tiddy coffin

[the-haiku-bot]

tumblr i’m begging

you please let me reblog the

big tiddy coffin

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

[essektheylyss]

"must a story have conflict?" yes. hope this helps <3

[hayaku14]

LOOK AT THESE CONNECTED KAITOU KID AND CONAN COVERS OH MY GOD

[eldestshowgirl]

I’ve been seeing so many posts about burnout relating to working/studying hard......but burnout from fighting mental illnesses, disabilities, and chronic conditions needs to be talked about more. When you struggle with these things, you fight so many invisible battles a day that you don’t even realize you’re burnt out. You don’t have to be studying or working or “oN tHe gRiNd” to be burnt out. Being strong every day is the most grueling and exhausting kind of work. Please know that you are valid, even if you can’t get up and work/study. You are having to learn a curriculum that school doesn’t teach, and I’m so proud of you <33

[eldestshowgirl]

I’ve been seeing so many posts about burnout relating to working/studying hard......but burnout from fighting mental illnesses, disabilities, and chronic conditions needs to be talked about more. When you struggle with these things, you fight so many invisible battles a day that you don’t even realize you’re burnt out. You don’t have to be studying or working or “oN tHe gRiNd” to be burnt out. Being strong every day is the most grueling and exhausting kind of work. Please know that you are valid, even if you can’t get up and work/study. You are having to learn a curriculum that school doesn’t teach, and I’m so proud of you <33

[2urbles]

podium trio!!

[2urbles]

podium trio!!

[antis-delete-your-blogs-pls-thx]

My friend, upon hearing about my return to Tumblr while Twitter is down:

[chikuxxxx-deactivated20190105]

[iraffiruse]

[the-goddamazon-deactivingsoon-d]

This post is so important.

[olderthannetfic]

*cackling*

If OTW weren’t around, this wouldn’t be “scaremongering”: It would be the inescapable status quo.

[lanninglurksnomore]

The people who believe this crap are the anti-vaxxers of fandom.

[olderthannetfic]

Oh god. They kind of are, aren’t they?

[athingofvikings]

I’d go bigger and just say that they’re the conservatives/reactionaries of fandom–or, to frame it differently, this is how conservative and authoritarian ideologies express themselves in the context of Fandom.

[kimberlyeab]

my opinion on AO3 is that it’s an important asset but i still find it scummy that they’ll ask for money but when their users try to ask for money they slam them with their non-monetization rules. Like Anne Rice is dead and this isn’t the 90s anymore, people are making money from fandom please catch up with the times.

[olderthannetfic]

I think you’ve misunderstood:

AO3 was built by a bunch of us with our free donated labor for the purpose of being a space free from commercial spam.

It’s not a public service. It was built by us to house the type of fandom culture we liked.

People who want to do fandom differently, including making money, are welcome to go build their own site with their own money or their own donated labor.

[elfwreck]

AO3 does not forbid commercial links because they think fans making money from fanworks is immoral but them making money (to run the damn site) is fine.

AO3 forbids commercial links because they are making a very specific claim about the legality of fanworks, and that claim is about noncommercial fanworks.

They’re not saying that commercialized fanworks are against the law. They’re just not prepared to host them–nor defend them in court.

In case people missed it: The OTW will not honor DMCA takedown orders that are basically, “I own X work and that’s a fanfic of it, and that’s copyright infringement so make it go away.”

The OTW says, lolnope, we don’t think that’s copyright infringement. If you disagree, sue us.

The OTW says: Disney - we will not remove explicit Mandalorian fanfic. Rowling, Warner Bros - we will not remove trans Harry Potter fanfic. Gabaldon - we are not removing Outlander fanfic no matter how much you think it’s illegal or a personal violation. Yarbro, if someone puts “The Adventure of the Gentleman in Black” on AO3, you will need to actually take it to trial to (try to) get it removed; none of this C&D order followed by fans caving because they can’t afford a lawyer.

…So far, nobody has sued them. (This is, in my mind, the strongest proof we have that fanfic is not copyright infringement. In 13 years, not a single person or company has scrounged up a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against AO3/the OTW for hosting fanworks.)

But they’re not willing to put themselves on the line for commercial works. Those get considered differently in copyright law. They’re not always infringing - there’s a whole history of parody books & songs to prove that - but the OTW is not dealing with them.

The OTW does not care if fans are making money. The OTW cares if fans making money interfere with its legal defense of its archive.

If you are not a copyright lawyer, your opinion about the situation is not going to be considered.

[thebibliosphere]

Also, it wasn’t just Anne Rice coming after fandom in the 90s as though this is some relic holdover terror from ancient history.

Events like Strikethrough and Boldthrough happened in the early to mid-2000s. It felt like you’d wake up every day in 2007 and find another fandom group on LJ gone. (And not just fandom groups either, important community groups for education and trauma survival were also wiped out in those purges as well.)

And while not exactly the same, Yahoo Groups–and yes Yahoo Groups was a major online fandom hub at one point–were deleted as late as 2019 with very little warning, leaving a lot of older fandom groups scrambling to back up decades worth of content.

I might be projecting, but Fanfic.net seems to be wobbling too. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out they go under in the next few years despite performing similar purges of adult content in 2012 and allowing for obnoxious ads, which made the site unusable on mobile unless you wanted to see an ad what felt like every couple of paragraphs. (It might be better now, I haven’t checked in a while.)

It has only been in very recent memory that fandom has gained any sort of foothold that isn’t poised directly over a precarious faultline that could at any moment open up and swallow entire communities whole, and a huge part of that is the volunteers at Ao3 who decided to play chicken with the likes of Anne Rice and won.

Ao3 at its core was and is built by fandom. Some people don’t like it and that’s fine, but to even suggest that the volunteers are lounging around eating peeled grapes and lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills making bank through fraud while fanfic authors are left out in the cold is beyond the scope of laughable.

[scififantasystuff]

They ask for all of that money for two reasons, one being larger than the other.

1. Employee expenses. Someone has to renew the page license, update firewalls, improve the webpage, and add beneficial features that the users are explicitly asking for. They also keep good copyright lawyers on retainer, who stay up-to-date on potential law suits and draw up legal responses to those Cease and Desist letter. That is not a nothing-expense. People deserve to be properly compensated for their labor.

2. This is the big one: Servers. I don’t know if y’all know this, but internet web pages do not have endless and infinite storage capacity. Since AO3 is ad free, it needs to come up with the money to buy and maintain servers from elsewhere, aka DONATIONS, which are willingly given.

It’s not a subscription service. Authors don’t have to pay to submit stories. There’s nothing predatory about it. If you don’t want to give, don’t give. But also don’t try and smear their name when you don’t understand a single thing about what they do for fandom and fanworks.

[olderthannetfic]

People do deserve to be properly compensated, but that’s not how AO3 runs. Almost all of the labor is donated, including those expensive tech skills and legal skills.

My biggest beef with the “I deserve a $5 coffee for my fic” thing is that the vital work of making the site exist at all is largely uncompensated. A given fic writer wouldn’t just be monetizing their own labor but that of a lot of other people who did not consent.

[cesperanza]

Yeah, I don’t think people realize–or can comprehend (!!)–that nobody gets paid–it’s all volunteer from the board on down, and even the lawyers work pro-bono. Server costs, machines, hosting for webpages for related activities, communications software, those things cost money, but the OTW is an all-volunteer nonprofit corporation. We did (I believe) once or twice hired limited-term contractors to help wit specific technical debt stuff (things about gems and stuff underlying the software, updating Rails), but the thing is mostly a giant labor of love. Because it turns out that not everyone creates awesome things  for money. As you might think an entire archive of awesome, custom-written fanfiction might prove. :D  Or to put it another way–the whole of OTW and AO3 is A FANWORK, YOU GUYS. 

[nahasketches]

Follow me on TikTok like @nahasketches to see my Merlin mermay challenge ☺️☺️☺️☺️

[dimensionhoppingrose]

This is so, so important you guys.

[mdzadr-deactivated20210116]

😌👌

[olderthannetfic]

I've seen a few people mention moving their works to squidgeworld.org as an alternative to ao3 now that the ai policy has been made clear, and was wondering if you have any info on it?

--

A delightfully venerable site!

Squidgeworld is the latest incarnation of the Wonderful World of Makebelieve, which has been running since 1999 (1994 for the overall site). It's where all the oldschool slashers used to post.

It's an old-fashioned archive run by one dude, @squidgiepdx.

And by that, I don't mean the coding is old but that it's a site run by someone whose actual personal account you can find and interact with and that has a moderate audience of a size where individual site culture is still possible.

Though, actually, it looks like the whole site (which includes hosting for more than just this one archive) is now a nonprofit, so that's nice for longevity.

I don't crosspost because I am lazy, but I have fond memories of all the fic I've read there, and I appreciate that he's still doing his thing in this era when lots of people abandon running a site themselves to cluster on ever fewer behemoths.

If you're looking for maximum kudos from randos, AO3's larger audience is what you want, but I think it could be excellent to take your buddies and all decamp to Squidgeworld together.

[who-do-i-know-this-man]

⚠️Vote for whomever YOU DO NOT KNOW⚠️‼️

Round 1

Leafos (Viva Pinata)

Ledo (Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet)

I know both/neither

Voting ended onMay 29, 2023

[oneangstymotherfucker]

Tw for vague csa/abuse mention

Sometimes, yeah, I "get off to" the fics I write. And I definately like hearing that other people enjoy them, because I think everyone deserves things they enjoy and it truly makes me happy to provide a little of that for others.

But the reason I write what I write is so my brain has a place to spin out scenarios to try to make it okay. And by that I don't mean the things that happened to me. By that I mean the fact that I exist as someone who those things happened to. The fact that I live every day with the rammifications of one man's evil decision, wrapping themselves up and weaving themselves into every aspect of my life. And when I write I come at it from all angles- including sexual because I was a prematurely-sexually-awakened kid and that can make a person's relationship with sex a little confusing to say the least- to try to figure out how to live with it.

Fic writers don't write to normalize abuse. We write to normalize suvival. And survival isn't always pure and pretty and fluffy. I was not healed by a wholesome loving relationship, I was not healed by friendship or forgiveness or by trying to banish all darkness from my life and mind. I am healing myself by looking it in the eye. By getting elbows-deep in the darkness, letting it coat my skin again now that I am grown and safe. By forgiving myself for the tracks it left in my mind and body, accepting that it is part of my story and trusting myself to keep me safe.

That's what I'm trying to normalize. That it's good you survived, and it's okay to be "messed up by it". You are normal, and your existence isn't bad or tainted or dirty or wrong. You are good and innocent. You deserve to be here and you deserve a full, satisfying life with all the things you enjoy in it.