p r o f o u n d l y g r e y

[strawberries-cherries]

People who comment on old fics deserve a special place in heaven

[vialesanaaa]

[important-cat-pics]

[importantcatpics]

[lesspopped]

please wear sunscreen!!! I've seen "fuck the beauty industrial complex" posts about complicated skincare regimens and am 100% with them except sometimes they mention sunscreen and no. no. absolutely not. sunscreen is a wonderful supportive friend who wants to keep you safe, and you should let her do it. throw out all your other cosmetics and skincare products if you want, but keep your sunscreen. and if you're not wearing sunscreen, start wearing it!!!! this is not about terror of aging, this is not about every tiny imperfection our fucked-up culture has made you feel insecure about, this is about protecting yourself from skin cancer. wear the damn sunscreen.

[systlin]

purge of 2002? of 2012? what ARE those?

Oh, how quickly the past is forgotten. 

They are part of the reason A03 is a thing now. Not the whole reason, but part of it. 

The Great Purges of 2002 and 2012 are when ff.net got a wild hair up their ass about THINK OF THE CHILDREN and nuked any fic posted on there that was explicit. Thousands upon thousands of nc-17 smutfics were lost.

It’s what led to the creation of alternate hosting sites for smutty fic…AdultFanfiction was the one I went to…but thousands of fics would never be recovered. 

[systlin]

Shit like the Great Purges and the Strikethrough of Livejournal eventually led to fans banding together to create A03, which I would have absolutely KILLED for when I was 15.

[persephonebooklover]

Back up ao3 was created by fans?

[systlin]

It’s…right on the main page. 

[fanfictionanthology]

I love this because I will bet you that persefv has read that bit we are all so inundated with hyperbole and advertising that says that the consumer is somehow in charge of whatever product they are shilling that we all just assumed this was another sales tactic.

[naryrising]

But we’re not even… selling anything…  *quiet sobs*

[wrangletangle]

No ads. No subscriptions. No data selling.

We are the definition of “what it says on the tin.”

[elfwreck]

Is there any way to spread this info? 

THE OTW WAS CREATED BY FANS SO WE’D HAVE AN ARCHIVE THAT WASN’T SUBJECT TO CORPORATE REVIEW. 

Nonprofit, so that nobody could ever say, “this isn’t making enough money; it’s getting shut down.” (See: Geocities, Quizilla, Figment, G+.) With lawyers involved and a firm awareness of the legalities of fanfic, so nobody would decide “we’ve gotten a nasty letter from a megacorporation with lawyers, so we’re hiding because we can’t afford to face a lawsuit. (Jedi Hurtaholics, Trevizo’s Millennium site.) With teams, so that an argument between co-mods didn’t result in the destruction of a whole archive. (Gryffindor Tower, Detention.)

AO3 IS OUR SITE.

It is by fans, for fans. Fans do all the coding. All the legal paperwork. All the abuse/tos violation complaints. Fans make all the choices about policies. Fans decide how to run the fundraisers. Fans write the blog posts. All the volunteer staff are fans; all the people who train them are fans. Fans wrangle all the tags. 

(And the other OTW projects, too. Fans manage the entries at Fanlore. Fans run the Open Doors project. Fans publish Transformative Works and Cultures.)

EVERYONE WORKING FOR THE OTW LOVES FANDOM. Wants it to survive. Wants it to be awesome for everyone.

(Knows that it can’t be awesome for everyone; some approaches to fandom just clash hard. But they strive to minimize those clashes as much as possible, because they love fandom.) 

AO3 is not some company that decided, “we’ll make a site for fanfic and then…” I don’t know what people are thinking is the reason. Money? Data harvesting? Tax shelter? Amusement and pity?

Nope; AO3 was fans saying, “Livejournal sucks; we’re tired of this fucked-up ‘rebuild every three years’ garbage; WE NEED TO OWN THE DAMN SERVERS.”

That’s the “of our own” part of the name. OTW isn’t a “them” running the site “for us.” It’s “us” making places for “us” to share what we love with others of “us.” 

[theaftersundown]

the holy grail types of fanfic

[awakefor48hours]

Every once in a while, I wish the friendship meter from the Sims was real so that way when people tell me "I used Chat-GPT" they can visually see just how much respect I just lost for them in that moment.

[artemisofmars]

Gonna start sending people this when they start talking about using ChatGPT

[inkskinned]

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

[inkskinned]

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.

[wdarlingyap]

"But I don't like the ending/the character/the plot point. I would have done it differently."

Yes. Good. Go get a pen. This is where it begins.

[scottbaiowulf-deactivated201805]

Male writers writing female characters:

“Cassandra woke up to the rays of the sun streaming through the slats on her blinds, cascading over her naked chest. She stretched, her breasts lifting with her arms as she greeted the sun. She rolled out of bed and put on a shirt, her nipples prominently showing through the thin fabric. She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards.”

[m1ssc0mmun1cat10n]

‘ She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards’ is the greatest fucking sentence I have ever read.

[silly-activites]

THE ORIGINAL??

[dduane]

(smh) Never thought I’d see it in the wild. Yet here it is. :)

[browniejeane]

always gotta reblog the ‘breasted boobily’ post

[thuriweaver]

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[psychotic-gerard]

listening to a man break up with his partner on the train and the first sentence I heard was "I just don't appreciate you cheating on me six different times, once with my own father."

[noah-wyles]

[igayorhm]

It's so weird to me that blocking has turned into such a serious thing only reserved for if someone did something wrong. I witnessed some discourse a few months ago around some content creator blocking someone and it blew up. They were harassed for "blocking someone for no reason". And I was like ??? cause there was a reason. They simply didn't want to see the blocked person's posts.

Blocking does not have to be some big gesture. I block people for being assholes but I'm also willing to block someone for giving a dumb take about my fav character. I've blocked people because I was tired of seeing their posts in a tag I'm browsing. I've blocked people who had opinions I agreed with but they were an ass about it. I've blocked people simply because I didn't like their personality or the vibe they gave off.

It's not that deep. You don't have to save blocking for "bad" people. If it brings you peace then do it. I promise you that you'll enjoy your internet experience much more if you block instead of engaging with the thing that's upsetting you.

[grayintogreen]

Rereading to do minor revisions also because I just love to reread my own stuff really is an exercise in oscillating between my god I’m a genius and HOW DID I MISS THAT BULLSHIT???

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

I don’t take people who insult published books they don’t like by saying “it reads like fanfiction” seriously, because these people obviously don’t know fanfiction doesn’t automatically mean “bad quality”, fanfiction doesn’t automatically mean “lesser than published original novels”.

some fanfic writers put as much time, effort and research into their fics as writers who write original works do their books, if not more. (not saying every fanfic writer has to do their research, obviously, because fanfic is a hobby, not a job. but some fanfic writers do insane amounts of research on what they’re writing about, I believe some fic writers put more effort into their fics than writers who write original stories do their books.)

fanfic writers aren’t all children and teenagers either. while children and teenagers can absolutely write fics and while I think it’s super cool that they write at such a young age, a lot of fanfic writers are adults with jobs and responsibilities.

I’ve personally read fanfics that are way more professionally written than some best sellers out there.

whether a piece of writing is a fanfic or an original work has nothing to do with its quality. if anything, I’ll even argue that—while writers who publish original works—write as their careers, for money, fanfic writers literally write completely out of love and passion. there’s no money involved, no capitalism involved, no corporation behind their art. they write for free. without gaining anything in return. because they’re that passionate about the characters and the stories they write about.

obviously I am not saying “writers who write original novels as their careers aren’t passionate about their stories”, I am not saying “writers who write original novels as their careers don’t love their stories”. what I’m saying is that for them, they still gain money in return. but fanfic writers literally write purely because they love what they’re doing. without gaining any money in return. and when people make art out of love and passion, said art tends to be have souls in them.

[bannock-and-biopolitics-deactiv]

A lot of adulthood is shouting “AUGH MY LAUNDRY” hours after you put it in the washer/dryer and running to go fetch it

[curlicuecal]

oh shit my laundry

[mishafletcher]

reblog to save someone’s laundry