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maureen2musings

Jacaranda trees

dr._arboretum_forest_

sinick

Flowering Jacaranda trees always remind me of exam time at University of Queensland.

#landscapes #Jacaranda #trees #flowers #Home Sweet AAAAAAustralia

bitterdatura

#owls #Barn Owl #voles

thevaultoftheatomicspaceage

sinick

These stairs are to DIE for!

#architecture #stairs #NOPE

movementnudge

Movement nudge!

#exercises #stretches #FOR GREAT REFERENCE

enchantedbook

"At the troll court" by Ink Yami

#trolls #monsters

teathattast

#LGBTQ+#Pride #NASA #space

tanuki-kimono

[Cyber Effect] astonishing modern raden (mother of pearl inlay) by Terumasa Ikeda. A nice pun on the classic Ghost in the shell ;)

Raden is a very old decorative craft (see video below), usually used on lacquer bases with floral or traditional motifs. It’s so great to see it used this way!

#mother of pearl #lacquerware #cyberpunk #two tags I never thought I'd use together but here we are

richardstabbert

In September 2011, an 83-year-old man named Maurice Sendak picked up the phone in his Connecticut home and called Terry Gross at NPR. He had been on her show many times before. As one of the most beloved children’s book authors in history, he had written and illustrated Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, and dozens of other books that became woven into the childhoods of millions. He had a new book out called Bumble-Ardy. He had created it during the most painful period of his life, while his partner of 50 years, Eugene Glynn, was dying. "I did Bumble-Ardy to save myself," he told Terry. "I did not want to die with him." What followed was one of the most beautiful interviews ever broadcast. For nineteen minutes, Maurice Sendak talked about getting old, about dying, and about the people he had loved. He spoke of the maple trees outside his studio window that were hundreds of years old and how, in the final stretch of his life, he had finally fallen completely in love with the world. He cried. Terry cried. Listeners all over the country, driving in their cars or washing dishes, pulled over and cried with them. He spoke of the tragedy of being 83 and outliving almost everyone he loved most—his parents, his brother Jack, his sister Natalie, his longtime publisher, and most painfully, Eugene. Then he said something that has been quoted ever since: "I’m not unhappy about becoming old. I’m not unhappy about what must be. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more." He talked about how strange it was to find peace so late in life. He had spent most of his years unhappy, raised by Holocaust survivors who carried a grief they passed down to him. He had spent decades in therapy, once saying he believed in the existence of happy people but had never been one of them. But near the end, something changed. He told Terry he was now in love with the world. He could look out his window at those beautiful trees and see them for what they were. He called it a blessing to grow old and have time for the things he loved—the books, the music, the quiet moments. "I have nothing now but praise for my life," he said. At the end of the interview, he shared something with Terry that stayed with everyone who heard it: "You are the only person I have ever dealt with... who brings this out in me. There’s something very unique and special in you, which I so trust." As they both wept, he added: "Almost certainly, I’ll go before you go, so I won’t have to miss you." Then, before hanging up, he gave her three final pieces of advice: "Live your life. Live your life. Live your life." Eight months later, on May 8, 2012, Maurice Sendak passed away peacefully in a hospital in Connecticut at the age of 83. His friend Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked, was with him in his final days and brought him a gift: a photograph of Lewis Carroll sitting on a windowsill with his feet hanging outside. It was a perfect goodbye. The man who spent his life drawing children stepping into other worlds was now stepping into his own. His books remain in nearly every library, and generations of children still join Max on his wild rumpus, always returning home to find their dinner waiting for them—and still hot. In that final interview, he told Terry he would keep crying for the people he lost all the way to the end. "I’m a happy old man," he said. "But I will cry my way all the way to the grave." He cried because he loved them. That was the whole secret. That was always the whole secret.

https://www.tumblr.com/hawkzees/809910096724377600?source=share

Genuinely, what do these dipshits think "fandom etiquette" means? Cause everybody in the tags talking about how evil the concept is, but I thought it just meant "tag to your best abilities, be polite, and don't harrass people"

They're talking about being told "Don't like; don't read" when they decided that flaming shippers of their NOTP was activism.

tiptoe39

This is just a wild out of the blue take and olderthannetfic may respond with something sarcastic that I might richly deserve, but I promise it's being presented in good faith.

I think one thing that's going on here, aside of the usual batshittery, is that people have stopped considering fandom as something subversive to the system and have started considering it part of the system. To those of us who grew up in the latter part of the previous century, fandom is deeply subversive, because the system that we grew up with -- the one with all the flaws, and with the embedded corruption and discrimination and what not -- was not aware of it, or when they were aware, they dismissed it as weird at best, perverted or disrespectful at worst. The point of fandom was to look at all those power structures and subvert them. Fandom was transgressive, and therefore transgressions within it--reactions against the mainstream, including mainstream ethics-- are part of the cake. They're a feature, not a bug.

These days, when people grow up around fandom, they consider it part of the system. Artists and companies endorse it, encourage it, try to commercialize it. Everyone knows it exists. So it seems part of the whole monolith of racist, sexist, etc., culture, and therefore, "calling out" pieces of it seems like genuine activism. Rage against the machine. But this ignores the fact that fandom itself is, still, its own rage against the machine. It's a bit like going to the Rocky Horror Picture Show and getting upset that people are shouting things at the screen because you're trying to enjoy the movie. When directing this kind of "callout culture" self-righteousness is wholly appropriate for the actual system, it turns into downright meanness when it's aimed at transgressive, transformative fandom, which was always supposed to encompass the dark side of how we consume and interpret media. One wonders if there is a schism in fandom itself between people who consider it "normal" and those who still see it as a refuge for people challenging mainstream culture. Or if there needs to be better terminology to define those two groups.

olderthannetfic

The way I usually describe this split is that it's about people who see fandom as Content™ and part of their media diet vs. people who see fic writing as a hobby.

Fic certainly is part of many people's media diet and often a very major portion of what they use for entertainment, but ye olde fandom was, on average, more focused on fic as an act of writing. Fic is something you do. AO3 exists to protect authors' right to post, first and foremost.

Someone might enjoy the hat I give them as a gift or like my pics of my sweater, but knitting is still primarily my hobby that's about me doing things with my hands, not a way for other people to get hats or nice pictures. When I write fic, it's a hobby that's about me writing, not you reading even if your appreciation as a reader does provide some extra motivation for me to finish shit and post it, both the actual social interactions and just imagining that a fellow shipper will now have something to read.

As fic has gotten ever better known and easier to find online, more people have started to take it for granted and talk about it from an exclusively reader point of view. Some of them are clueless and self-absorbed. Some of them are doing it intentionally to further an agenda.

This isn't entirely new. When I was in HP fandom years ago and adjacent to some really insanely big BNFs, I witnessed a mountain of "I'm just a little guy" posturing. Twenty-five years ago, some corners of fandom were already plagued by readers treating fic writers like youtube stars who had power over them and owed them things. Some of the BNFs cultivated this crap; most did not. But it took a truly insanely massive fandom to have the glut of fic that made that possible. Those fandoms were very rare in the past. They're much less rare now, and the overall hugeness and searchability of AO3 is extremely visible.

It's not just about fandom being more mainstream. It's also about changing social pressures to monetize every single hobby and moment of time. Insert rant about the gig economy here. There's a bit of an age split simply because the younger generations have less hope and more pressure to ruin their hobbies with MLM-ish thinking.

People pulling the "wah, wah, wah, WHITE MEN" shit do not have good intentions.

The biggest factor that lets them get a foot in the door and prevents sensible people from instantly blocking everyone who starts in on this is that AO3 succeeded.

In 2007, the norm was for m/m fans to be treated as second class citizens all over the internet.

In 2026, the norm is for m/m fans to be treated as second class citizens all over the internet aside from AO3 and sometimes Tumblr.

It is possible to exist in a bubble where AO3 looks like big brother in a way that was simply not the case twenty years ago. WWOMB and other multifandom slash archives existed and were certainly pro-m/m, but they were relatively small, not central hubs like FFN. LJ was a welcome respite from the unending "Why can't men just be friends" and worse, but we all know how that turned out. And even then, it was common for a LJ com for such-and-such a fandom to be slash-only or het-only or something. There was a huge split even if slash was starting to win out more and more.

AO3 is the infrastructure of fanfic fandom today and it puts the equality of m/m front and center in the site design itself.

Unfortunately, that also artificially inflates the popularity of m/m on AO3 allowing stupid people who are emotionally 5 to rail against m/m and pretend they're railing against The Man while ignoring what posting on their fandom's main subreddit is like.

I do think AO3-style fandom does bear some blame (aside from the popularity of AO3 itself) for the stupid attitudes.

Meta of days of yore vastly inflated the amount we actually elevate walk-on characters and overstated how genuinely transformative fic tends to be. It's a useful legal argument, but most fic is actually a lot like canon plus some extra kissing and/or punching.

Meta and acafandom coming from the Western side of things also didn't bother to know or care about Asian fandoms for years while also being largely silent on minority characters in US media while also going on and on and on about how extremely accepting and revolutionary and feminist and special fandom was.

I do think women writing erotica at all is still revolutionary even in 2026, but if we can recalibrate our claims to be more reflective of actual fandom, I think it will leave less room for bad actors to sound reasonable. We've basically taken everything that's potentially offputting about middle class white US feminism and added "ew, weebs". So when someone is like "How come you aren't elevating the black characters?" people are left scrambling and come up with incoherent or even blatantly racist explanations. ("Rico just didn't seem like he supported Sonny." HE WHAT NOW?)

The actual answer is that we rarely elevate anyone, and we need to let go of the self-important belief that we do. We just make main characters kiss who didn't in canon, and the number of black leads is small and the number who didn't get shafted by canon is smaller. [Cf. my many rants about filmmaking visual language vs. the script and how some characters "should" be awesome but people subconsciously know they aren't and thus don't get fandomy about them.] The other answer is that people are expecting fandoms to look like HP when they usually look like two years of yuletide fics and then silence.

Fandom is special, but it's special in a far narrower sense than some of the ridiculous paeans we've written over the years, and being able to be honest about that would also help us push back against people weaponizing Bad Archive Stats to pretend that hating their NOTP is activism.

Fandom does often let people from homophobic environments discover a Queer As Norm type of art that they can access even if they don't have a credit card and can't access mainstream entertainment from such-and-such a country.

That's great.

It was great in the 90s. It remains great now.

Fandom is also pretty willing to latch onto a variety of countries' media and a variety of ethnicities of character, but only if that media is readily available, in certain genres, and neither too good nor too bad, and only if the characters are central ones whose internal emotional life is presented as important by canon. So Thailand can add SE Asia to East Asia in the pantheon of oft-ficced media sources by coming out with some BL series that are decently acted and have okay budgets, but an Afrofuturist film three people saw at a film festival is probably not going to revolutionize AO3 fic stats.

Fandom likes all genders of characters and of ships, but m/m tends to be more popular than f/f in AFAB-heavy spaces, while f/f tends to be more popular than m/m in AMAB-heavy spaces, and we are too misogynist, too misandrist, and absolutely too transphobic about every flavor of transness to handle any kind of reasonable conversation about any of that.

Essentially, there are parts of mainstream culture we never challenged and we still don't. I think that's okay. But pretending we were and are revolutionary on all axes makes it easier to attack us.

We were too up our own butts about our specialness, succeeded too hard at AO3, and are too scared of being called unprogressive to be able to push back against bad actors who treat fic as Content™ and think Susie Q Fic Writer and That Network Head with the Insensitive Tweets are exactly the same.

#fandom #fanfic #fandom etiquette #fandom history #AO3 #Purity Police PISS OFF!