my stomach angry and yellin' @sureaintmebabe - Tumblr Blog

Yknow, when you keep insisting that adults can’t enjoy fandom or play video games or what cartoons or whatever, it’s other young people that you’re hurting the most. Because the most you’ll do to adults is offend or annoy them with that nonsense, but when you plant that idea in a kid’s head, they grow older with the horrible dread looming over them that the things that bring them happiness and comfort have an expiration date. When I was a young adult, I was genuinely depressed about the thought of getting older because I thought I couldn’t keep enjoying all my hobbies, like I had to give up everything I enjoy once I reach [x] age.

And that is simply not true. It’s bullshit. But the harm is does to people is very real. Kids are so afraid of getting older, and one of the big fears is that their life will become painfully bland and boring once they hit adulthood, as if all adults do is work and pay taxes, possibly raise kids. No more fun, no whimsy, no playfulness, no joy.

Anyway, I’m 33 and I love video games and fanfiction and cartoons. If you tell me I’m too old for that stuff, I’ll roll my eyes and block you and go on with my day. But I will worry about the 17 year old who saw your post too and feels a sinking in their chest at the thought that they have to give up the stuff that makes them happy. THAT’S what bothers me.

foxofninetales

Getting older in fandom mostly just means:

You’re better at recognizing fandom patterns and can avoid the toxic ones, leading to increased fandom enjoyment.

Now you have to zoom the text on AO3.

ao3commentoftheday

FYI, if you’re a person who wants larger text on AO3, you can zoom in or you can use a site skin (skins only work if you’re logged in though).

The easiest way is to scroll to the bottom of any page on AO3 and look at the left-hand side of the footer. Find Low Vision Default and tap on that, and you’re set.

If you don’t like the looks of Low Vision Default (or if you just want the text inside the fics to be larger but not the rest of the site), you can create your own very simple site skin:

Tap on your name at the top of the AO3 page

Select My Dashboard from the dropdown menu

Select Skins

Tap on Create Site Skin

Give your skin a unique name so that you can save it

Paste the CSS below into the big empty box

Tap the Submit button

On the next page, tap Use

CSS is as follows:

#workskin p { font-size: 24pt; }

Set whatever pt font you prefer to read with and enjoy.

(this CSS code can also be added into any other skin you might be using. Just copy/paste it in there)

#ao3

unreadable

#photography #nature #blue

lsleofskye

waterfalls in the middle of the forest during daytime | Sandra Seitamaa

#photography #nature

allthingseurope

Gunby Hall Garden, UK (by Nigel Dickin)

#flowers

the-evil-clergyman

Illustrations from In Powder and Crinoline by Kay Nielsen (1912)

yo, @sophiechoir

I have three modes of reading

Dont read

Read a 500 page book in a day

Read only fanfiction until my eyeballs drop out of my skull from exhaustion

#me #i either don't read anything for a decade #or read 70 books and 400 fanfic in a year

gnossienne

Alfred Agache, Enigma (1888)

by lurchi1112

do interact

Access to deleted fanfiction.

I recently saw a post here on Tumblr that said that when a fanfic gets deleted from Archiveofourown.com or Fanfiction.net (or any other website you can think of) you will never be able to find this again. But let me tell you… this isn’t true.

Nothing ever leaves the web!

I’m going to be using @jbsforever as example. Hope you don’t mind! And if you do just tell me and I’ll delete this post.

Anyway, jbsforever recently deleted all of her fics on Ao3. This is how her page looks like right now:

As you can see there are only 3 fics available. She had a lot more than that. Luckily for us, she’s putting them on again! (THANK YOU SO MUCH 😘). But there were still 16 fanfictions available that we can’t access through her page anymore.

All you will want to do is open google.com, type in the name of the writer (or the name of the fanfiction if you remember) + the website that their fanfiction was published on.

So for example: jbsforever archive of our own

Now you would have the normal search results appear, like here above ^^.

Normally you would click on the words that are in blue to go to their page. But this will bring you to how the page is currently installed. So we will be working with the words under there, the ones that appear in green. You can see a little arrow pointing downwards at the end of it.

Click on this arrow and a little box with the word “cached” will appear. You will want to click on this. Guess what her page looks like now?

TADA!!!!! 16 fanfictions and their names for you to enjoy. Unfortunately if you click on one of the stories while on this (rediscovered?) page, you will get an error:

But don’t worry! All you have to do, is take the title of the story you want to read. Go through the exact same process you just did with the author’s name, but just type their name and the title into google now (author + title). And you will have access to their deleted stories!

You will have to google each chapter individually (so type in google: author + title + chapter of choice), but honestly that’s a small price to pay for having access to a goldmine of fanfiction!

Hope this will come in handy for you! And thank you @jbsforever (ily ♥♥♥).

Have fun reading, everybody!

#fanfiction #ao3 #important #info

olderthannetfic

You keep talking about the origins of AO3 as this group effort by an actual group of people who were friends and who spent time discussing this with each other in person. It's kind of blowing my mind. Is there a post or a journal somewhere that specifically keeps record of this?

I'm dying.

Nonnie, seriously?

No, that's mean, I know you're serious. It's just flabbergasting how much fandom has expanded and how much there isn't a direct link to the past.

Astolat and Cesperanza floated the idea at Vividcon and various places, I think, though I wasn't going to cons in that era. We were all on LJ in those days, and Astolat made a big post nailing her theses to the door. Discussion in the comments was instant and prolonged.

A LJ com was set up to discuss. It was later renamed to otw_news, but if you go all the way back to the beginning, you can see brainstorming mess instead of official news posts.

Fanlore page linking to Astolat's post and giving a little context.

Early brainstorming: https://otw-news.livejournal.com/2007/05/

For example, here I am collecting links to older archives to look at for research when designing AO3.

Fun fact, we never intended to call it AO3. There was a whole call for name suggestions, but nothing was as evocative as astolat's original post title referencing Virginia Woolf. (For those who haven't thought about it, AO3's name is a reference to A Room of One's Own.)

Here's the name discussion

Here's the poll that came out of it

But also notice how many people voted: 562.

That's how many people cared at the time: a few hundred. Maybe a thousand if you count lurkers, but frankly, that community was not as lurkery as now. It wasn't just ten friends. It was a community effort. But what "our" community looked like at the time was vastly different. It was six degrees of Kevin Bacon astolat, not a vast sea of strangers like fic fandom on AO3 is now.

Here's an early post suggesting we ban the under 18s from the site entirely. Pity we didn't do so, given the rise of antis.

Here's the invite to a fundraising party at astolat's in NYC that following Halloween. I dressed as Amanda from Highlander, not very well.

You can tell we knew each other by looking at those comments on astolat's initial post. You can also tell how discussion-based that part of fandom was back in 2007.

The way my tumblr is now with a ton of text, back and forth, and hopping around between threads of conversation, all featuring a consistent set of faces, is very much like LJ. Most of tumblr is not.

tzikeh

This is important info to put out there, and I constantly forget that "fandom" as it is now is nothing like the community we had then. This is a good resource for understanding what was going on with the creation of AO3 in particular, but it's also a great example of why older fans say that we miss the Livejournal era of fandom so much.

AO3 is the result of long discussions, hard work, and a dedicated community of fans. Though it isn't is a social media site (and it was never intended to be), it is the only place now that sometimes feels like how the fannish community used to be on LJ--when a good discussion gets going in the comments on a story. But AO3 is for fanfiction et al, and therefore is limited in discussion subjects.

(The ads you'll encounter if you follow those links, though? Did not exist when we were there and were one of the reasons we abandoned the site--not the most important reasons by a long shot as you'll understand if you read more about why AO3 was created, but they were a factor.)

We were a collection of communities, with some-to-significant overlap in members. Fanfiction writers were not "content creators," and people who didn't write fanfiction were not "the lucky audience who should be soooooooooooo grateful that writers deigned to gift us with their incredible talent." We knew each other. Many of us met each other IRL after meeting through fandom (once fandom shifted to the internet there was some hesitancy at first about meeting "online" friends, but that was quickly gotten over). We went to conventions together. We had lunch and dinner and parties and meet-ups IRL outside of conventions.

If you take a wander around from even just that one LJ community (click on a username to check out their personal LJ), you can see how discussions would branch off without excluding anyone the way they do on Tumblr. If you wanted to share something you saw on someone else's LJ, you just linked to it, and people followed the link to read it and join in the discussion (or just lurk). The force of Tumblr splintering is an active barrier to creating real communities.

I really miss LJ. I miss the connection I felt to my community there.

olderthannetfic

#fandom is supposed to be a community -- not a two-tiered system of sellers and buyers

Yup.

#ao3 #fanfiction #fandom