#alice rants

[aliceblossoms]

Little rant;

As many of you know, I'm a sucker for stationary but especially fountain pens. I own quite a few, ranging from dirt cheap to pretty expensive. I know my way around them. Cue me sitting at the dining table at my bf's place, talking to his parents, and pens come up. His dad says he's got a Parker fountain pen, but it never really worked so it's been left to catch dust, asks me to take a look at it. He grabs the pen, I open it up, sure there is a converter in it and a ton of dried up ink. I ask him what ink he put in, he grabs it; it's Chinese brush / calligraphy / permanent ink. My heart drops. It's everything that doesn't belong in a fountain. Looking at the quality of the pen- likely it wasn't cheap, gold plated nib and accents, black sleek design, Parker branding. I don't know the make- I've tried to figure it out and I might ask reddit for help, but no clue. I have spent the entire rest of the evening cleaning out this pen- it wasn't enough. I was determined to bring it back from the brink of death, unsure if it could be saved. The gold plating on the nib was dissolved by the ink, only remnants left, there were literal pieces of dried ink in the shape of the nib coming out of it. It was so stuck in the converter I could barely twist it down to suck up the water. I could only imagine how back it would be in the flow channels of the nib.

Anyway, a few weeks, a shit ton of time, enough water to flood a small village and some good ol' blood, sweat and tears later. I've filled it with parker blue fountain pen ink. It's working. It's writing. I just packed it in my bag to hand it back over to his dad but like, I'm gonna give him a crash course pen care.

[greeksorceress]

i can’t sleep (insomnia has been kicking my ass lately) and i am reading fanfiction that i saved a couple years ago from different fandoms and i’m getting hit with this overwhelming sense of nostalgia…

like, most of these fandoms are not even a thing anymore; they were niche to start with and with time it became incredibly difficult to create within the fandom when the original resources were so limited— other fandoms, though, were big and based on mainstream pieces of media, but their death came rather swiftly when people started to move on…

and so, i can’t sleep and i cannot stop thinking about the fandoms that used to be so lively, so full of creators and bursting with content and interactions and possibilities… the fandoms that have been forgotten now, that make you wonder if someone will still be there if you try to come back to them, if it will be the same if you do come back (it rarely is) ….

and this train of thoughts have made me think about the friends that one loses when the fandom dies, when they log off for the last time and move onto another hyperfixation and you never hear about them ever again. i’m thinking about all the friends i’ve made throughout my years in fandom spaces, about all the people i interacted with for the last time without knowing it. i think about them; “where is this random person i used to talk to for a couple of months back in spring 2020 now? i would love for our paths to cross again.”

and then, like a bolt from the blue, i think about me. i think about the possibility of me being that one friend or mutual for someone else. the fandom friend they lost and now think about from time to time without knowing much else. i think about being missed as much as i miss and i wonder. i wonder if my presence has ever marked someone deeply enough to remember me even if we don’t talk anymore or barely have time to do so.

ah, it’s all nostalgic… does anyone else get emotional over these things just like i do? that’s why i would love to carry you all my friends with me to the eternity. 💌✨

[alicenchanted]

I am now getting very clearly ai acotar writers on my feed. I dont want to send them hate but i also really want to send them hate. Not just because ai is bad, but also because it is the most unfunny garbage ever.

[adecila]

I think they are doing this to us on purpose...

I love this fandom, I was sad and depressed because of the 💩 ending but after reading all of this amazing jonerys fics I felt happy and no matter what I still found comfort on this.

Please I now it's a lot to ask but don't go don't let them took away this bubble of happiness (you and the others on this fandom created for all of us) from us too.

On purpose? Yes if by that you mean the purpose of doubling down on the season 8 ending and milking whatever they can from the old Game of Thrones fan base. You know, the same ones who are so easily swayed by CGI dragons and will tune in to watch The House Of The Dragon. And the ones who think that the only thing wrong with the ending was that Dany's turn was too quick (but they thought she was mad in the first place, so that's not why they're raging about the ending), the ones who wanted Jon to kill the Night King instead of Arya and the ones who wanted Jon to end up on the Iron Throne.

WE ARE NOT THE SAME WHAT THE FUCK IS NOT CLICKING

Now that I'm heated again and in light of what Emilia said, I'm gonna say this respectfully but you're giving too much credit to HBO AND Kit.

Let me refresh your memory!!!

HBO agreed to the ending we got. Have y'all suddenly forgotten?? The HBO CEO watched the rough cut of the 6 episodes and thought hey these are great

In fact HBO stood by the ending after the petition to redo the season gained worldwide popularity

HBO even thought it appropriate to insult the fans even further and stick by their ending when they gave D and D a cameo in Westworld in which they chop up Drogon

While Kit himself feared that the ending would be divisive, he thought that it was justified:

I'm not saying he wasn't traumatised because it obviously fucked with his head having to kill off his friend on screen (READ THAT AGAIN) I'm just saying y'all are mistaking his grief related to the end of GoT as to the grief for Dany's botched up story.

In fact Kit thought that Jon's ending was "really sweet" 🙃

I cannot overstate how much Kit has in fact stuck by the writing choices

Emilia saying now that this spin off (told y'all the news was real and legit, even if it the spin off might currently be in just the very beginning stages) is certified by Kit doesn't mean shit to us Dany fans!!!

Because tell me what in everything I showed you that Kit said regarding season 8 sounds like a man who would ONLY do a Jon Snow spin off in order to revive Dany and retcon season 8?? It just sounds to me that he loves the character so much he'd probably play it again in most circumstances now that he has had time to deal with his mental health.

Like an asoiaf podcaster said, who if given $10M to play Jon fucking Snow would say no out of principle?

Exactly.

And I'm not "letting them take away anything." Please. I was amongst the last women standing when the last episode aired. I was one of the few still trying to hold everyone's hand through the grief we've had to deal with. I have and still am pouring my heart into so many jonerys fics and I will continue to do so until I can't do it anymore. I've stuck with jonerys through all the shit Kit has said since the ending of GoT, I just tune him out now (after the proper rant ofc) because I really don't trust his judgement on a lot of things 😃

And before you come for me I can still like Kit and drag him for all the shitty things he's done and said. It's called nuance 🤍

Go read an old jonerys fic today and show the author some love. We don't need HBO. We don't need shitty spin offs. We've done well for ourselves for the last 3 years, this isn't going to suddenly make me love jonerys more. Thank god my love for Jon Snow (the legit one, not the s8 one), Daenerys Targaryen and jonerys doesn't depend on what Kit Harington says or does.

[loonylupinblack3]

okay so i'm annoyed and i've decided to rant about it

in my fic, i made pandora a lestrange. there isn't actual information on who she was before she became a lovegood, but i heard the lestrange rumor and liked it, so i made her one.

that should be all fine, but apparently it's not. the amount of comments i've gotton from people telling me i'm wrong, that she was a malfoy or a black, and telling me i wrote MY story wrong, is just frustrating.

this is my story. my FANFICTION. so what if she was actually a malfoy? i genuinley don't care. she's a lestrange in my fic so you can either suck it up or just not read it.

DON'T leave me rude comments telling me how to write my story and my characters, because i am over it. i tried to write something fun and then there are people who continue to come at me because of a certain thing in my story they don't like.

like, its MY story. i'm writing this in my spare time, not getting paid for it, so stop treating my story as if its a published book you can tear a part, because you can't.

that's not what fanfiction is, and honestly i'm sick of it.

[alicethemasked]

So, I just had the shock of realising that... after 10ish years on this hell site as an invisible ghost I suddenly have a lot of mutuals

What the heck

[quantumized-insanity]

My thoughts on the death of Twitter.

Twitter is dying, hell it's pretty much already dead. I personally never had a twitter account, but it was important. With facebook arguably falling out of favor with the latest generations, twitter was the defacto social media platform for large swathes of people from every demographic and age group. It was a conversation space, and yes it could be hostile, toxic, and prone to mobs, but it also had intimately human moments. It holds so much of our culture, records of developments that will just fade to mild fluctuations in magnetic fields, as the hard drives that once contained crystalized pieces of our human journey, become nothing more than rubbish.

The internet is like an ecosystem. There's a balance to it, a push and pull. It has currents,tides and jet streams, complicated interconnected relationships that not even we as the participants fully understand. And now, one of the single biggest occupants of an ecological niche we do not even fully understand, is about to disappear. Not die, disappear. Because death implies decay and return, as if more than a decade of human communications are going to go somewhere, or return somewhere. But there is no place for it to go to, or return to. We are losing so much historical data, so much that we won't even know what we're going to miss until it's far too late.

And that's just about the historical records issue, because when twitter goes, there is one part of the platform that will need somewhere to go. The people. To paraphrase Aristotle, "Nature abhors a vacuum". Twitter is dying, and it's not going to leave anything behind except its users, and the people who built it. I cannot say what will happen next, but there are hundreds of software and firmware engineers without a job, and several hundred million people without a platform.

I was looking over an article on where Twitter users planned to go next. There were lists, and discussions of using mastodon, and explorations of discord group chats. I felt like I was looking at the build up to our mini apocalypse, and I was there for the tumblr exodus. I watched as the entire platform panicked, as we all ran around like chickens with our heads cut off. It felt like the entire platform was collapsing, and then I watched, as the platform shuddered, and groaned, and it held, but I remember watching communities talk about where they would go. I admit that I was genuinely scared, because I thought that this gestures vaguely might be over, and now I can't help but to think of twitter, and its users. Because for them, it really, probably, is over.

Imagine the level of panic that we went through during the 2016 ban, except instead of tens of thousands, imagine hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of thousands of communities packing up their bags and discussing their best options for survival. The absence of twitter as a platform is going to drastically all sorts of dynamics, and the energy from hundreds of millions of panicked people is not something that just fizzles out. The death of Twitter is going to have ripple effects we can't even being to understand yet, but this is an end of an era. Something big is coming, and while I can't pretend to know what it is, or what's going to happen next, this feels important. This feels like a moment that people are going to talk about in history books one day. We are watching the future unfold before our eyes, and we are cursed to not understand what it all means until it's over.

[tinuvijela]

I am terrified by the new visuals for the amazon lotr series. TERRIFIED I SAY. There was nothing I dreaded more than them getting the rights for anything prior to the Second Age. I mean, the visual is awesome, ok. But the fact that I first thought it was a visual of Numenor.. Until I saw the two trees (instead of one) in the distance and someone making a detailed analysis why the city would actually be Valimar, and then someone saying it could be Tirion as well.. I'm not gonna lie, I'm terrified that one of the previous reports was right in saying they have been given some rights for Silmarillion. I thought they just got full rights for the Akalabeth instead of having only the Appendices, but seems like it isn't so..

At this point maybe we should collectively make a giant bingo card consisiting of all the things we fear Amazon may do/use in the series lmao. Let's make it somewhat entertaining I guess 🤡