the picklest pickle

hello I'm pickle! I draw sometimes! icon by the most amazing miluu and header by the kookiest nikooki I'm so blessed | Please don't repost my art under any circumstances!!

[halalcocaine]

there she goes again, daydreaming about her future house and how she’ll decorate it knowing she can’t afford a house in this economy ever. and by she i mean me.

[crossroadswrite]

From the weirdly specific au prompt list! “my best friend owns a restaurant and you wrote a bad review of it in the local paper so it has become my goal to track you down and fight you” au

ngl this was the most fun i had and the happiest ive been with a fic in a While

[AO3]

“You!”Yuuri shouts, pointing his finger accusingly, voice definitely too loud forsuch a quiet street.

Listen,here’s the thing. Yuuri isn’t a confrontational person. Really, he isn’t. Hehas enough anxiety that just thinkingabout confrontation sends him running for the hills.

“Yes, you!Gorgeous man with the cute dog!”

Yuuri isn’ta loud person, either. He promiseshe’s not. No, really! You can ask anyone who has known him for any period oftime. He’s quiet and non-confrontational and a mess with gorgeous people.

“Come here,and fight me, coward!”

And Yuuriisn’t even violent. In the slightest.His parents have raised him to solve his conflicts by talking, with compassion,and critical thinking. He swears they did! And he’s not aggressive. He hasn’teven thrown a single punch in his entire twenty-three years of life.

“Get yourobjectively perfect ass in here!”

Here’s whatYuuri is right now: drunk on too many beers and upset that Yuuko’s restaurantgot a bad review by an important food critic.

Should hebe doing this? No. Can we stop himself now that he has stomped his way in frontof Victor Nikiforov? Also no. This is out of his hands now. Drunk Yuuri isdriving this car, and Sober Yuuri will have to deal with the wreck when he comesaround.

Keep reading

[picklestpickle]

preview of my collab pieces with @sinkingorswimming for @erosyuurizine!! c: dommi wrote an incredible spicy drama please look forward to it!!

[thetwoguineabook]

Blackbird - print edition!

Hi everyone- it’s been a while, but unfortunately I have a very busy and tiring job and haven’t had much time or inspiration for writing recently. However, I have something pretty important to talk about! This is an idea that I’ve been sitting on for a while, but after recent events in Pittsburgh I feel like it’s something meaningful that I can do to make a difference right now.

I am going to do a print run of Blackbird, with 100% of all profits going to support Jewish charities- the Community Security Trust here in the UK, and Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, in Israel.

Yes, I do mean actual, physical, printed copies- I’ve had so many commenters say, ‘I wish I could have a copy of this fic like a real book’, so this is your chance! I am still researching the best options so I can’t confirm price right now, but it’ll be via an online self-publishing and sale platform which should be able to handle international delivery.

I’ll also be looking for an artist to commission to do the cover- nothing super fancy, but if you have commissions open right now and would be interested in working together on this, hit me up!

More details to come once I have more stuff sorted out- in the meantime please spread the word to people who might be interested, and help keep me motivated to get this project out of the door.

[seunggilzine]

🌈 We are pleased to announce that our store is now OPEN!!🌈

Preorder your very own copies from MUJIGAE ON TICTAIL.

And for Philippine orders, please click here!

It has been such a long time coming but we are truly happy, excited and honored to have taken this journey with all our creators, consultants, and of course friends whose support, patience, and creativity have helped formed this truly wonderful project to what it is at this very moment. This is by us, for you.

“Mujigae” is a fan project dedicated to Seung Gil Lee. So little of him is shown in the series but this project aims to fill in those gaps — put color into a canvas that many often overlook. This is a collection of his life (his alternate lives); his dreams, his goals, even his relationships, told through the colors of the rainbow - the very concept that his (in)famous costume has given rise to.

The book has two parts: the main section being all about Seung Gil, and a second where his “ships” come into focus. Whether you’re a fan of one or both, we certainly have something in there for you.

You can find more about this project in our About page, who our Contributors are, and perhaps find more answers in our FAQs.

Thank you so much everyone for your support and patience, BUT WE’RE FINALLY HERE and we really really hope we can give this boy — this beautiful boy — the love and the recognition he deserves through this humble project.

[picklestpickle]

Hi pickle, I’m a nooby noob artist who wants to sell merch but doesn’t know where to start. How did you get into it? Any words of advice?

Hi anon!

Ahhh that’s so exciting! c: hmmm, in my case I started with stickers and prints since they are relatively cheap to produce! so my advice would be to start small and see how that goes! 

it’s also important to familiarize yourself with your country’s postal service! what fair shipping fee should you use for local and int’l orders, what the shipping requirements are (would you need customs form? special envelopes? etc!), and research on how to safely package orders so they won’t be damaged during transport (tougher mailing envelopes could also weigh more so take that into account!). c: 

if you want to start with producing charms, enamel pins or other high cost merch then that’s fine too! but you have to understand that these types of merch would need bigger investment from you since they need bigger capital. and you need to prepare yourself to learn to accept when things don’t go well. (I’ve had to shell out extra $$$ when samples are wrong and would need adjustments! and some things don’t sell as well so losing $$$ and not breaking even happens.) everything is a learning experience! c: 

I think the most important is to try it out and see if it’s something you would enjoy doing! the whole process is incredibly tiring, from designing to looking for suppliers/manufacturers, to setting up your shop, to advertising your wares, to packing and eventually shipping, but it’s all very rewarding! 

good luck good luck!! I hope everything goes well for you! c:

[picklestpickle]

I reopened shop!!! will be open until Oct. 31!! c: 

also holding a twitter giveaway for art.exe enamel pin!

store: picklethings.tictail.com

[picklestpickle]

lanzhan taking the entirety of his yearning back home 

[picklestpickle]

lwj lovingly looking at wwx in every lifetime ;;v;;

just cross-posting from twitter! I drew this before episode 15 came out I think?? ahh I really like wwx’s yiling patriarch look!!

[my-otp-list]

Stunning is simply an understatement.

@ Mo Dao Zu Shi donghua backgrounds.

[fairestcat]

On the AO3 all these years later

The tenth anniversary of the OTW and all the AO3 discussion going around this week inspired me to go look at astolat’s original post about creating an An Archive Of Our Own, and found my comment on it:

“I think this is needed and long past needed.

There are of course huge fanfic archives out there like ff.net, but the bigger and more public the site, the more restrictive it is, the more stuff around the edges gets cut off. I don’t WANT the public face of fanfic to be only the most easily palatable stuff, with the smut and the kink and the controversial subjects marginalized and hidden under the table.

And I particularly don’t want to see us all sitting around feeling frustrated while this fabulous community is commodified out from underneath us.

I’m not fit to be a project manager, but I’m great with details and general organizational work. If someone takes this and runs with it, I’d love to help.“

Eleven years and rather a lot of volunteer-hours later, I stand by every single word.

[fairestcat]

And then I found my original post on the idea that became the OTW/AO3, which says in part:

“However, as I was reading the comments over there, I noticed a frustrating, but not surprising number of comments along the lines of “well, it’s a good idea, but it’s way too ambitious”

I’m not talking about the really useful and practical comments bringing up pitfalls and difficulties to be aware of from the get go with something this massive and complex, I’m talking about all the comments that go something like this:

–

Amen. I want a site like that. I’d pay money for an archive like that, and I’d invest time and effort to make sure it’s as great as it can be. […] But then I hit the realism switch in my brain and it goes ‘splodey. Because sadly it’s not a very realistic concept.

And this:

–

In a perfect world it could be an amazing thing and a great way to “rally the troops” so to speak and provide a sort-of one-stop shop for fan-fiction readers and writers. I see a couple potential problems, though.

Or this:

–

Oh god. I like what you’re saying, I really do, but I think it’s actually impossible to achieve.

and all the various comments that start with

“It sounds like a cool idea…but”

or words to that effect.

Taken separately, these comments don’t seem like much, but every time a new one showed up I couldn’t help but be reminded of

this post by commodorified, and her oh so brilliant and beautiful rant therein:

“WOMEN NEED TO LEARN TO ASK FOR EVERY DAMN THING THEY WANT.

And here are some notes:

Yes, you. Yes, everything. Yes, even that.

All of it. Because it’s true. We’re mostly raised to live on table scraps, to wait and see what’s going when everyone else has been served and then choose from what’s left. And that’s crap, and it’ll get you crap.

Forget the limited menu of things that you automatically assume is all that’s available given your (gender, looks, social class, education, financial position, reputation, family, damage level, etc etc etc), and start reading the whole menu instead.

Then figure out what you want. Then check what you’ve got and figure out how to get it. And then go after it baldheaded till either you make it happen or you decide that its real cost is more than it’s worth to you.”

And THAT is what Astolat’s post is about. It’s about saying “THIS is what we want, let’s make it happen.” It’s about aiming for the ideal, not for some artificially imposed, more “realistic” option.

And I think that’s fabulous. And I think we CAN do this, we CAN make this amazing, complicated idea happen. But in order to do so we’re going to have to be careful about those little voices inside our heads saying “well, it’s a nice idea, but” and “there’s no point in trying for that impossible thing, let’s aim for this ‘more realistic’ goal instead.”

Because, damn it, why shouldn't we ask for every damn thing we want. And why shouldn't we go out there and get it?”

I am so pleased to have been proved correct. 

(And also, in the category of “women need to ask for every damn thing they want”? I took those words to heart, which is one of many reasons Marna/commodorified and I have been married for going on eight years.)

ETA: I know some of the links are broken, they copied over from my original post and I didn’t have the energy to either delete them or track them down elsewhere.

[cathexys]

Asking for it and doing it!!!

[redwingstarling]

So inspiring. And yes - at the time this seemed such a pipedream, but look at it now!

[olderthannetfic]

Yup. I remember saying I’d support it regardless, but it would only really be useful to me as a poster if it allowed every kind of content. Heh.

[cesperanza]

God this brings it back.  People saying we couldn’t do it, that we would never be able to do it, etc. And then there was the sort of six months later moment where people were like, but where is it? (!)  Dudes, we had to found a nonprofit company first! so we could be legal and raise money and pay taxes and have a bank account and enter contracts - and moreover, the archive was written from scratch: from a single blinking cursor on the screen, custom-designed from the ground up.  I remember that I had the job of tracking wireframes in the early days as the real designers figured out how the flow of pages in the archive were going to go. Amazing.

Anyway,  I want to say that the group that came together around the OTW /AO3 in those first years had a track record like WHOA: so many of those people had been archivists, web-admins, fannish fest-runners, newsletter compilers, community moderators, listmoms (kiddies, you won’t know what this is) or had other fannish roles that gave them enormous experience in working collaboratively in fandom and keeping something great going year after year. And  OTW continues to attract great people–and so also, while I’m blathering, let me say that volunteering for the OTW also provides great, real world experience that you can put on your resume, because AO3 is one of the top sites in the world and TWC has been publishing on time for ten years and Fanlore is cited in books and journalism all the time and Open Doors has relationships with many meatspace university libraries and archives etc. so if you think you have something to bring to the table, please do think about volunteering somewhere. It’s work, believe me, but it’s also pretty g-d awesome.

[astolat]

And THAT is what Astolat’s post is about. It’s about saying “THIS is what we want, let’s make it happen.” It’s about aiming for the ideal, not for some artificially imposed, more “realistic” option.

I want to pull this out for a second because I have in fact generally spent much of my life aiming for big unrealistic goals, very few of which I’ve actually achieved, and many of which I didn’t actually want by the time I got close to them. 

The thing about aiming for “unrealistic” goals is that the work you do to achieve those goals doesn’t disappear even if you don’t achieve the goal. We still haven’t accomplished everything on our giant AO3 wishlist. There remains plenty of work to be done (and the OTW and the amazing current team working on the AO3 can always use more help, as Cesperanza says!) 

But because we collectively threw ourselves at this project, there is an archive, and it’s not just good, it’s better than anything else out there. <3

[fimyuan]

Good morning Wei Ying~

twitter

extra:

[lansizhuis]

jiang cheng + wei wuxian for xie-lian (x)

[picklestpickle]

I reopened shop!!! will be open until Oct. 31!! c: 

also holding a twitter giveaway for art.exe enamel pin!

store: picklethings.tictail.com

[musashigouda-deactivated2019032]

hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity

[blooming-wilting]

You know it legally is a charity, right?

If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code … 

The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function. 

You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity. 

It needs what it gets to function and improve. 

[fangasmagorical]

kiena-tesedale replied to this post

They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much servers/hosting costs.)                    

In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy. I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text based rather than video.

AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.

Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.

It sees about 6 million people a day. About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per search. The demands involved are astronomical.

JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.

It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.

But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?

Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.

Care to guess its budget?

Double that of AO3.

AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.

The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.

It’s absolutely batshit fucked up that people are fighting to have the OTW defunded and AO3 shut down. They are the only organized group that actually stands directly between fandom- all the art and the fics and the vids and the music and the chats and the memes and everything we love about interactive, transformative work- and an incalculable amount of lawsuits.

[sanguith]

I just discovered there is a small subreddit dedicated to google-translating (and actually dubbing, very professionally!!) the Star Wars movies and occasional SWR episodes from english into chinese and back into english again, making the subtitles change ridiculously, and it’s positively the most hilarious thing I’ve ever come across since I saw the LotR post about a similar thing, here are some highlights:

[ikeracity]

it’s not an x-men movie unless charles says “don’t do this” to erik