No Theme Here, Im Just Trying To Have Fun

Jay | she/they | Queer Cryptid | Loves reading Is trying to get back into actually writing | Fan of the Witcher, ATLA, Marvel, OFMD, the Sandman and many other things, but The Owl House has currently taken over my life following the new ep | not spoiler free

[penandinkprincess]

I know in my heart that ilya rozanov is buying girl scout cookies each year like nobody's business

they get him with every single cookie booth

does he actually need a fifth box of thin mints this week when four of them are still completely unopened? no.

but their little faces are so cute and they are such good little sales people and oh look his wallet is in his hand now, yes miss scout, what is your recommendation-

shane comes to his house for the first time during cookie season and sees like twenty boxes on the counter and is just? the fuck? is this??? you fucking with me about my diet??

and ilya just makes a helpless little hand gesture because it's frankly just out of his hands.

[hardlyhinged]

Op’s tags

[penandinkprincess]

the idea of it becoming A Thing among the girl scout troops near where he lives that they have to determine their strongest arm wrestler ahead of time

the mental image of ilya losing an arm wrestling match to a brownie in her little vest while surrounded by cheering scouts is something that can be SO personal

[aces-to-apples]

Hey just in case anyone was on the fence about going to see Project Hail Mary in theaters or ever this is your sign to go see Project Hail Mary in theaters and also buy it physically. This movie fucks severely. It is immaculately paced, not a single second was I bored or waiting for a scene to finish up. It is incredibly charming, with strong characterization and main characters who are charismatic and flawed and incredibly compelling at every second. The plot is bananas in the best way and every second of it feels reasonable and earned. It's funny as shit, with the entire theater around me laughing out loud at least a dozen times. It's tragic and hopeful and made me at least tear up several times. And it's beautiful and that man's soulmate is a rock and it's the best fucking movie I've ever seen, I would recommend it to absolutely anyone in a heartbeat.

Go see Project Hail Mary!

[taumoebas]

project hail mary I love you so much my head hurts. I love you stories about friendship I love you stories about science I love you stories about language I love you stories that are unabashedly hopeful and kind and forgiving. I love you empathy and curiosity. I love you ryland grace you are so scared and so sad but you are so loving and caring. project hail mary you are so special

[halethleia]

[dr-paint]

Hail Mary Full of Grace

[xxskycrystalxx]

RYAN GOSLING wearing a cardigan made by Tom Daley

[loving-jack-kelly]

imagine being rocky and grace and knowing your whole life that nobody quite Gets you in the way you wish they did. and then you meet this creature from outerspace and he's so different from you in every way but he somehow fills in every gap in your soul. he has the information you need, he has the sense of humor you didn't know you had in you, he's excited about you and everything about you because the differences are what MAKES it exciting, and you feel the same way back at him. imagine you're rocky and you have this precious laptop cradled in protective life support and you think, "well, this is it. this is all i have left of him." and imagine you're grace and you look at the xenonite habitat littered around your ship and you think, "well, this is it. this is all I have left of him." and you (rocky and grace both) watch the fading readout showing the distance growing between you, until it all goes wrong. and then you (rocky) asume you'll die here, alone and afraid and unsure anybody will ever save your planet. and you (grace) have to decide if this time you'll be brave enough to set off on a journey knowing there's no way home.

and in the end, the two of you (rocky and grace both) get to spend more time you didn't think you'd have knowing and understanding. you learn the languages fully. you pick up quirks and habits and pieces of culture. and even when the happy ending is provided for you (grace) and there's a shot at making it back to your planet, you aren't even sure you want to take it. because you (grace) love this life, this weird, alien, unimaginable life that you've gotten to build. and you (rocky) hesitate to offer but you know you have to. because you (rocky) love grace an unimaginable amount in an unimaginable way. but you (rocky and grace both) get to make that choice together, this time. it isn't an impossible choice. and if you want to stay together, here on Erid, you (rocky and grace both) can make that choice guilt-free and happy.

[butchfagminotaur]

i don’t know how to explain to you people that no matter what a country’s government is like i do not and will not support the US indiscriminately bombing that country’s civilians and i don’t know why that’s a controversial take tbh

[butchfagminotaur]

“oh iran is a dictatorship!” “oh palestine is homophobic!” i don’t care like literally i don’t care that’s not a problem to be solved by other countries blowing innocent people up

[loveridden1999]

Alysa Liu, the 2026 Olympic Champion in Women's Singles Skating

[booksinmythorax]

"Don't use Libby because it costs libraries too much, pirate instead" is such a weird, anti-patron, anti-author take that somehow manages to also be anti-library, in my professional librarian-ass opinion.

It's well documented that pirating books negatively affects authors directly* in a way that pirating movies or TV shows doesn't affect actors or writers, so I will likely always be anti-book piracy unless there's absolutely, positively no other option (i.e. the book simply doesn't exist outside of online archives at all, or in a particular language).

Also, yeah, Libby and Hoopla licenses are really expensive, but libraries buy them SO THAT PATRONS CAN USE THEM. If you're gonna be pissed at anybody about this shitty state of affairs, be pissed at publishing companies and continue to use Libby or Hoopla at your library so we can continue to justify having it to our funding bodies.

One of the best ways to support your library having services you like is to USE THOSE SERVICES. Yes, even if they are expensive.

*Yes, this is a blog post, but it's a blog post filled with links to news articles. If you can click one link, you can click another.

[knottahooker]

Please, PLEASE use Libby. OverDrive. Hoopla. CloudLibrary. Kanopy. Flipster. Freegal. Transparent Language. Mango. Jstor. Your library would not offer it if they could not afford it, and we afford things by reporting the number of people who use that service, so if you don't use the service we can't afford it. It's a cycle. Keep it going, keep using it, and we'll keep providing because we'll be able to justify the cost to the bean counters in government.

[animentality]

[eternal-fractal]

Can't express how stress free being open minded is.

Some lesbians use he/him? Oh cool.

Some people have people inside their head and sometimes it's fictional chars? Sick your brains like a pirate ship they're all working to run.

Some people like being treated like a pet dog? Bark bark bro.

Being fat isn't unhealthy but a perfectly normal type of body to have? Kinda beautiful how different we can all be.

Something doesn't make any fucking sense? Cool an opportunity to learn. And even if I can't figure it out it's cool we still have mysteries today.

[owenthetokencishet]

It's just... idk man. People are weird. Being a person is weird. Society is weird. The universe is weird. Rather than having to "normalize" everything, just accept that some people are weird. So are you. Nothing is normal. the rules are all made up. I once saw a Klingon pushing a baby stroller down the street in toronto. The world is a weird place, man. Just roll with it.

[milliarage]

thats the thing thats missing from america-centric discussion of fascism: this shit is global. every country in “the west” is seeing the same rise of fascism in real time, all of it focused on murdering migrants. like giorgia meloni is campaigning to deport people to “migrant camps” in albania. last year the greek coast guard outright drowned a boat of 500 asylum seekers. and as that last post said im not dismissing the suffering of people within the US, i’m just saying its so supremely frustrating that every conversation is about the minutiae of american domestic policy and not the horrifying ultranationalist global trend scapegoating arabs and africans.

[milliarage]

my point is you need to be horrified that “border control” is an accepted talking point. you need to be aware of the fact that climate change is currently driving what will become the largest forced movement of people ever as the “third world” becomes uninhabitable. people—specifically people from africa and west asia—are dying in the name of white supremacist “borders” around the world. and whether your european or american when you see this rhetoric manifest in your country you need to push back.

[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.

[magsgotswags]

It’s cute how people think that Anne Rice was the only one who did this. Look at what Disney does to people who they think are making money off fanworks (lightning Mcqueen dude on tiktok, for example). (now what really would be fun is if they found a way to claim that people who make money from their 50 minute long youtube vids about their Marvel predicitons (which IS FANFIC it’s just that it’s mostly dudes) are making money from thier IP. Because they are.)

[ambular-d]

IIRC, Anne McCaffrey,  J. Michael Straczynski, George R.R. Martin and Marion Zimmer Bradley, among others, have also thrown hissy fits over fanworks (MZB possibly with some rational grounds for it, since I seem to recall she actually did get caught up in a legal snafu involving a fan who claimed she’d stolen their ideas.)

[olderthannetfic]

The MZB situation is… uh… complex, to say the least. Nobody agrees what happened, but it appears MZB’s people approached a fan about using her stuff in exchange for a thank you, and the fan wanted money and actual credit as a writer. (According to the fan, they then threatened her to shut her up, which makes some sense in the context of MZB being post stroke and hiding it at the time.) Basically, it was some kind of clusterfuck that probably involved covering up that MZB was no longer able to write.

[hellabutts]

Ngl the people who hate on AO3 *specifically* for the fact that they do fundraising and claim that they all must be rolling in money? They come off to me like the Fox News of Fandom.

Also we go through this *every year* and at this point it just feels like willful and malicious ignorance.

[taraljc]

people think that servers and bandwidth grow on trees. no but for serious. The only site that possibly uses more bandwidth than AO3 is Amazon for Pete’s sake.

[kawareo]

My only new year's resolution is to leave more comments on AO3

[themunflower]

Project 2025 ain't gonna roll out all at once. So what we're gonna wanna do is make passing each individual part of it as difficult as possible, so there's less to undo once we finally get this country back on the rails.

[tobiasdrake]

Resist every step and do not get distracted by stupid bullshit. Distracting people with stupid bullshit is one of Trump's favorite political techniques. We saw it all over the place in the first term.

Trump will say something like "You know the Hispanics actually punch kittens, it's what they do."

And the news will be like "TRUMP SAID HISPANIC PEOPLE PUNCH KITTENS" for three weeks.

And while they're doing that the Republicans in Congress have quietly deleted healthcare.

Do not get distracted by stupid bullshit. Trump is a dancing monkey whose greatest asset is the ability to yank the spotlight off of everyone else. Keep your eyes on Congress.

[shymagnolia]

so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

[shymagnolia]

okay so i just got my dream job??? a week after applying to it?? and now i’m thinking….maybe this is the good luck post

[flagellant]

…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment

likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post

[coffee-or-hot-cocoa]

i need all the help i can get for finals

[finnglas]

Hey so

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

This might be the real one, y’all.

[azaraspirit]

what the hell? i could use some luck *hits reblog*

[i-love-you-beautiful]

You know what I could use some luck