the archivist is always cold @highresmess - Tumblr Blog

unfortunately there are like 23 billion other things to worry about right now but just for the record: straight people who are trying to "rebrand" pride month as "national nuclear family month" are so fucking evil. positioning gay pride as antithetical to the concept of a family is evil. doing so in a way that is explicitly white nationalism is evil. acting like queer pride is the thing that destroys families is evil.

we are not just backsliding, we are back at the milquetoast assertation "love is love." for the record: when people ask us why we need pride this is literally fucking why. when other queer people ask me if we really need all the rainbow shit, this is why. when we make a fuss about so many shows not having any positive queer rep: this is why.

it has only been 11 years since it was nationally legal for gay people to get married. homophobia is still very much alive and well - and it is often the thing that ruins a family.

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

Hey. Things are going to get better.

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

You cannot prevent it.

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

Yes I am threatening you with a good time.

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

Have A Good Day, Bitch

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

depsidase

vamp-orwave

Instagram article from Fifty Shades of Gay

inkskinned

you know what? fuck it, man. the world is held in the fists of people who like to break things. at this point i’m saying who gives a shit. wear that victorian dress you don’t have an excuse for. dress up like a witch, pointed hat and all. who cares anymore. why worry about it when there’s bigger stuff to worry on. i’m saying. yeah, this lipstick is too dark, wanna share? i’m saying go talk to her, tell her that you like her hair. i’m saying she’s out of my league but i’m still swinging, i’m saying yeah i’m in a ballgown and it’s a pta meeting. what about it. eat the extra brownie, tell her your feelings. i’m saying if nothing matters than we might as well give nothing meaning.

inkskinned

#i’m saying if existence is a void at least i’m going down screaming.

it’s been 9 years since i wrote this. i was experiencing 24/7 anxiety so badly that i needed serious medication. these days in the back of my car is an “emergency party box.” when people admit they no longer really celebrate their birthday; i tell them to put the sash on and queue up kesha, we’re going bowling or something. these days i can’t spin around without finding something i am enamored with. these days i list 3 things i’m grateful for before i fall asleep. you’re probably one of them, just by virtue of you existing.

at the time i wrote this, i was suffering through a severe panic attack literally every night. i tortured my brother with constant 2 AM calls just to hear someone else breathing, because i couldn’t be alone in the silence.

i rarely wish i was still 23 even though ironically i had more hope back then. what i can tell you is this: i love the same way, but bigger now. i’ve worn the velvet cape to several business meetings. i spent thursday in a crop top without caring what my stomach looked like.

i told her i like her; i often dress as a witch. i still got glass in my foot this morning. i’ve kissed maybe a thousand people since then and met a million more than that; passing like the shadow of a hammerhead in trains and planes and buses.

i saw you, beloved, there, maybe, on platform in south station. you didn’t speak, but you said: i struggle to give the nothing meaning. the nothing fills up everything. it is just loud and yellowed panicked silence. i can’t stop shaking.

on the roof, birds curl together against the chilled spring wind. the sky outside of the craft store was an iridescent pink. the nothing already had meaning; you are giving it meaning by witnessing.

the act of living, beloved: it’s just decoding how to translate it.

curlsandstems

Have you ever seen a violinist going APESHIT?!

Be sure to check out IAmDSharp!

lightanddarklove

The way the white violin stands out so much in the night scenes, the whipping around of his hair not diminishing his playing, and the rings. They make each bowstroke stand out so much! Fantastic stuff.

omegaverse

I make fun of coffee drinkers for being physically addicted to and dependent on badbreath bitterdrink but when i dont have my morning tea i feel like a mentally ill caveman about to do something bad.

omegaverse

^ the gurgling farter

iamoutofideas

you’re all gonna love me for slamming cans of mango monster in the morning

omegaverse

^ the jittering trembler

mazeltron

omegaverse

^ The nefarious anglerfish

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

give me a nice thought

cletusthurstonbeauregard

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

bitch I’ll live to WRITE it

anxeious

lunamonchtuna

— Mirza Ghalib, from Diwan-e-Ghalib (via lunamonchtuna)

dogmotif-deactivated20240505

yeah they dropped a new love language. yeah a sixth one. its biting

olderthannetfic

A New History of Fandom Purges

On November 24th, 2018, I posted a list of major deletions of sites or of content on sites that stripped fandom of its history. A bunch of pro-shipper blogs had just been deleted, and people were nervous. I suppose I was thinking “All this has happened before…”

On December 3rd, 2018, Tumblr’s Department of Irony announced the NSFW ban. Thanks for providing this salutary lesson to The Youth and a billion reblogs to me, I guess.

Today, we have AO3 for writing. Audio, images, and video are in as much danger as ever, yet fans attack AO3 every donation drive. For those of you who forget our past…

HERE IS WHAT HISTORY HAS TAUGHT US!

1992 - Chelsea Quinn Yarbro forces a zine to be destroyed

1995 - Viacom/Paramount goes after fansites

1995 - Anne Rice gets IWTV fic deleted everywhere

1997 - Fox and Lucasfilm go after fansites

1998 - AOL goes after X-Files fansites

2000 - Warner Brothers goes after Harry Potter fansites

2000 - Anne Rice anne rices again

2001 - Tripod Massacre

2001 - Anne Rice goes after IWTV fic on FFN

2001 - The Bronze shut down as Buffy changes networks

2002 - FFN bans porn

2002 - FFN bans RPF

2003 - Gryffindor Tower implodes

2004 - FFN bans script format

2005 - FFN bans CYOA, Readerfic, 2nd person, Songfic

2005 - Sheezyart bans adult content; y!gallery founded

2005 - Viacom/Paramount goes after fansites again

2006 - Sakura Lemon Archive suddenly closes

2007 - Strikethrough, Boldthrough on Livejournal

2007 - Youtube institutes Content ID, deleting many fanvids

2008 - Slash Cotillion closes, taking much historical m/m with it

2009 - GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites

2009 - Greatestjournal shuts down; RPGs deleted

2009 - Marvel gets scans_daily deleted

2009 - imeem, major vidding hub, closes suddenly

2010 - FFN forums purged for inactivity

2010 - DeviantArt purges adult fanfic

2010 - Literate Union goes after Twilight fandom on FFN

2011 - Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence

2011 - China arrests women for writing m/m; destroys danmei.org

2012 - major FFN crackdown on porn

2012 - Megaupload deleted for piracy; also destroys vids, podfic

2013 - Max-Dan-Wiz.com purged of fan-generated content

2014 - Quizilla shuts down

2014 - China purges m/m story websites; arrests female authors

2014 - Blip.tv deletes vids

2014 - Viddler deletes vids

2015 - Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank

2016 - y!Gallery deleted

2016 - Elfwood goes offline

2016 - Audiofic Archive corrupted; major blow to podfic

2017 - Chinese author jailed after being ratted out over fandom drama

2017 - Parents get queer Warrior Cats fic purged from Wattpad

2018 - Tumblr deletes pro-shipper blogs

2018 - Tumblr announces NSFW ban

2018 - Wattpad deletes accounts/fics without warning

2019 - China purges weibo of m/m; more women jailed

This is only a small taste of the many times that:

Fannish moderators got bored, ran out of money, or had a falling out, deleting a site/list/forum along the way.

Sites got bought out and closed for being unprofitable.

Fandom got hit as governments targeted piracy or political dissidents.

Fans grudge reported each other.

Official forums got deleted when the canon finished.

It’s not always malicious. It’s not always about us. But we lose every time.

Some of these purges hit everyone. Many of them hit m/m content specifically or female gaze-y material in general. This is why antis are dead wrong. This is why anti-fujoshi policies end up being anti-m/m policies. This is why we need clear labeling, not content restrictions.

This is why we need AO3.

And it’s why we need a solution for audio, visuals, and video too.

totallysilvergirl

So grateful for the historical memory and the long view on a phenomenon many of us have come to late, and/or take for granted.

And this is why AO3 generates twice its goal amount in just a few days: they are irreplaceable.

sarahbatistapereira

As someone semi-concerned we’re entering a danger period for fandom as we’ve all come to know it, this was a fascinating skip through history.

kingcriccket

you CANNOT read too much old timey fiction because I was playing Raft with the lads this morning and without a THOUGHT said we could sail over to another island "if the wind would consent to blow" & let me tell you. This did not pass by unremarked.

rainyydoves

mckitterick

V.E. Schwab's advice for creating memorable characters - works for both protagonists and villains

source post: X

dduane

This is really good advice.

It also ties neatly into the simplest version of the formula for getting people emotionally engaged with your characters: or how to build the moment in which your character starts moving from their initial state to the state in which they'll start changing their own lives.

First, you figure out the one important thing the character believes that they're wrong about. There's usually a core misperception that they haven't examined. Once they're forced to engage with it, it'll start to change everything about their perception of the world they're inhabiting and/or the people in it.

Then, as V.E. says, you identify the character's great desire and their great fear: the thing that character wants more than anything, and the thing or situation that terrifies them, and that they'll go to any lengths to avoid.

And having identified these two objects or situations, you build a situation in which the two forces will be in close, direct opposition to one another... then drop the character down in between them, and squeeze. Those two opposing forces become the jaws of a vise... and you crank the vise more and more tightly closed until the character has no choice but to acknowledge those opposing forces, and start (even in a small way) to deal with the pressure being exerted and push their way through.

This does not have to be, initially, a great climactic moment. In fact, it works better if it's not. It's more effective if your character has a brief low-intensity brush with these conditions-in-conflict early on. That way, when your big resolution scene comes along about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way along through the story arc, you'll have set up a resonance between that earlier hint or intimation of what's to come, and the really big blowoff. Your readers will recognize the resonance—the throb of tension between the two occurrences, like the vibration of a plucked string—and will find satisfaction both in the true resolution having been partially telegraphed earlier, and in how it's now being experienced and resolved in full.

This approach also allows you to set up more minor resonances between the realization of the conflict and its final resolution. These can serve to bind the structure of the work more closely together: to make it look (and be) less like a series of loosely strung-together plot events, and more like a unified whole, in which ripples of story business flow backwards and forwards, interpenetrating and influencing one another, and hinting at the big one to come.

But none of this can happen until the paired and opposing what-do-they-most-desire, what-do-they-most-fear axes have been defined. So that's a subject it's smart to spend some while thinking about (and for all your characters, not just the major ones), to be sure you're getting it right.

It's not unusual to get the wrong answers, or merely superficial ones, while you're still working out what's actually going on with the characters. So take your time. Eventually you'll find a set of answers that feel unquestionably right... and you can then nail those down in your notes and get on with making the kind of "good trouble" for your characters that will see them made complete.