all about the ann(e)s

33 | she/her | west coast | gay | film & tv nerd | Gentleman Jack + the ann(e)dom + Sophie Rundle’s Face™️ + my GJ podcast on iTunes / Spotify / SoundCloud

[basic-banshee]

I keep using my girlfriend with unusual work hours to get out of coworker interactions and happy hours and hanging out.

But now the company holiday party is upon us.

And I’ve been lying about the girlfriend.

I suddenly really empathise with the characters in Hallmark Christmas movies.

[basic-banshee]

I like that people have two reactions to this post.

Reasonable: “just say she couldn’t make it!”

Chaotic: FAKE DATING AU

Well, which one is it going to be?

[basic-banshee]

And so it begins

having the DMV area Craigslist bookmarked has never come in handy before but now

[basic-banshee]

Update, Craigslist has flagged my post as inappropriate.

[basic-banshee]

Apparently you can’t solicit a date as a “gig”

I now see my mistake

[basic-banshee]

Update: a date has been acquired. This is true lesbian solidarity in action.

[justluckyiguess]

My wife has now read this and wonders how baby gays are even meeting and mating

[basic-banshee]

Can confirm I am meeting and mating just fine 😂

[basic-banshee]

By the way I’m in a relationship with this woman now

[cooliopumpkin]

[basic-banshee]

This is the feedback I’ve been looking for

[charlesoberonn]

[world-heritage-posts]

world heritage post

[wholesomepostarchive]

1/22/2022

[thought-i-to-myself]

So it turns out being an adult doesn’t feel any different. I mean I thought I’d be all changed and grown up but it’s actually the same old me reading fanfic and watching YouTube vids of my ships except now a 4 year old watches Peppa Pig right next to me.

[thought-i-to-myself]

Accidentally deleted an anonymous ask about which Ann is my Ultimate Fantasy Ann since we’ve been devoting so much time in the casts to @we-are-all-lady-women‘s Ultimate Fantasy Anne. So despite my idiot ass deleting the ask, I am compelled to answer:

OBVIOUSLY this is a trick question because there are TOO MANY Ultimate Fantasy Anns for any single one of them to be my favorite. See, for instance, a representative sample:

Greek Goddess Ann.

Little Spoon Ann.

Big Spoon Ann.

Unimpressed Ann.

Pensive Ann.

Proud Girlfriend Ann.

Undeterred Ann.

Gay Glow-up Ann.

And obviously:

THIRSTY Ann.

And Baby Top aka Power Bottom! Ann.

In conclusion, Ann Walker is a damn angel and we don’t deserve her.

[thought-i-to-myself]

I keep journals since 1994. They are all sealed with duck tape at my parents home (my mum is a bit noisy, bless her). I am both curious and terrified to broke the seal and read them. So many people, decisions made, sexual desires, strong opinions in pretty much everything. Should I crack a bottle and read my life?

I would have to say yessssss! Bust them open, Anon!

No time like a quarantine to reflect back on where you were, who you were, and the choices you made. Crack your bottle open, crack those spines, and enjoy the adventures and drama and schenanigans of your youth!! If it gets to be too much, you can always tape them back up.

But you might discover something you’d forgotten - an old flame! a funny memory!! And it might just be nice to revisit yourself as a younger person knowing now that you’re okay. (You’re okay? Right Anon?) Report back & let us know how it goes📚🤞🎩🍾🥂

[thought-i-to-myself]

What a comfort is this journal, I tell myself to myself and throw the burden on my book and feel relieved.

[thought-i-to-myself]

I want to quarantine in Sophie Rundle’s back yard - is that creepy? 😂

Shit, was I sending myself drunk anonymous asks again? Or are there two of us out there?

We can always keep dreaming, Anon! Happy (and healthy) quarantining to you and yours 🤞🤣🎩🕶

[justsomeantifas]

people will be like “fanfiction writers!!! are everything”

and then turn around and say a website that doesnt pay the writers they make their traction and money off of is a saint that would do no wrong.

im just saying. ao3 gets their money

those writers dont. lmao.

so whyre you making it about the writers when they could post pretty much anywhere huh? 😂 and youre only paying a website.

[justsomeantifas]

u ever consider they do it this way on purpose so the only people making money on their poorly designed website are the owners

👀

[prismatic-bell]

Have YOU ever considered it’s a volunteer-run website that’s a nonprofit and is incredibly transparent about where its money goes?

Have you ever learned, like, a SINGLE THING about the legality of fanfiction?

Or are you just being an asshole?

[ms-demeanor]

“poorly designed”

You mean that ultra-lean, fast-loading site with maybe the world’s best data sorting and tagging that is open source so you can set up your own archive if you wanna try to run something that big without ever asking for money or if you wanna try to make it prettier or something?

That is free to host fiction on as well as free to read fiction on and is a site with an incredible amount of traffic that runs exactly zero ads aside from occasional funding drives?

[riazendira]

As a person with a law degree, can I just tell you how vitally fought and precariously won the ability to even HAVE Ao3 is!? And how a lot of that balance rides on it being a non profit that no one makes money off of? And how very much Ao3 does with how little $$$? (To the point where I mentioned the site traffic to a web developer friend and he honestly couldn't see how the site could even exist because in his world to make it would cost so much and require so much work that it blew his mind that Ao3 even existed with the functionality, traffic, and utter lack of budget compared to what he usually worked with!)

Some days you kids today make your dearest rum aunty wanna beat her head against the wall. I swear to dog.

[jabberwockypie]

Fanfiction has to be free to survive.

It’s not a matter of “Oh, without that dastardly AO3, fanfic authors would be free to make money off of other people’s intellectual property″ and framing it that way is disingenuous.

The way copyright law and Fair Use work right now - the way legal precedent stands in the US, at this time - the only thing stopping Disney from swooping in and suing someone for writing Steve/Bucky fanfiction is that nobody is making any money off of it.

Is it fair that it works like that? Possibly not, but that’s not actually the argument at hand! That’s the way that copyright law works right now. And before AO3, anyone who wrote or hosted fanfic online was in danger of randomly getting a C&D one day - and most people don’t have the money or resources to fight that.

It happened. A lot.

And it wasn’t just porn! I know the anti-AO3 people like to frame it that way, but it has also happened to stories without any smut at all, just because the person or company holding the IP felt like it.

[lynati]

Nobody is making money on the site. Not the people who founded it, not the people who coded it, not the people who wrangle tags for it. Notice that there's not a SINGLE add on the site. Money isn't being made every time someone loads a page or hits the "next" button, unlike many other sites out there. There's no fee to read, let alone a tiered structure to entice you to hand over a higher amount of money per month. If AO3 wanted to make money... well, then it would be shut down because the only reason it *legally* gets to exist is because nobody is profiting from it on any level. But if that wasn't the case and AO3 really wanted to make money, there's so many better ways they could do so than by a completely-option donation request a couple times a year?

I don't know how you could spend any time at all in fandom and not know these things about AO3. Or miss the fact that they show EXACTLY where every dollar that comes in from their fundraisers goes to.

Like, do you even GO here??

[bitternest]

You could run the AO3 frontend off a couple of shitty Thinkcentres networked together for redundancy and haproxy in front of all of it. The site is extraordinarily light and the biggest challenge is load balancing it.  

AO3′s backend is... 

Listen. I work for a $600 million a year company serving DNS and domain names to literally everyone who isn’t shopping at GoDaddy. I help run the most successful MVNO in the US. I don’t want to say I wouldn’t even know where to start to build AO3, but I know exactly where I would stop. And that’s at the tags. Everything else, sure, I could build in a week. DBs, backups, a fuck ton of caching, monitoring and alerting. Give me another couple of weeks and I’d build some basic self healing so I dont have to get up in the night when something as big as AO3 breaks. 

The fucking moment you tell me you want me to index hundreds of millions of tags, I’m fucking out. We do something similar with domain name recommendations and let me tell you that fucking POS system breaks monthly and it is a goddamn nightmare to fix. You would have to pay me, a single person, what AO3 asks for its entire goddamn operation every year. As far as I know their tech people consist of a sysadmin, a DBA and a few front end folk, all of whom are volunteers. 

Which means that $130,000 is all being spent on tech. The fact that that number is below seven figures means they are doing it with all open-source software, zero support contracts and probably hardware that fell off the back of a Supermicro van. And no, they’re not in The Cloud because this shit would cost them an arm and a leg there. I checked. Indexing hundred of millions of tag fuckarightouttahere.

AO3 runs on blood, sweat, tears and some kind of Christmas miracle. So yeah, OP, go cry a fucking river. You’ll only fuel them. 

[thought-i-to-myself]

NERD ALERT BUT AO3 IS A DAMN TREASURE

[thought-i-to-myself]

PSA: If you’re not watching Motherland: Fort Salem (on Freeform in the US), I highly recommend.

The series follows 3 witches entering military training camp in Fort Salem. Because there is a WITCH MILITARY & it is steeped in tradition & it is awesome.

The cast is diverse, super talented, and ridiculously good looking in uniform.

The lead character is a lesbian who kicks serious ass.

Also she has a love interest starting in EPISODE 1 & the gf has her own interesting backstory/plot lines.

That’s it; that’s all you need to know.

[thought-i-to-myself]

These reblogs are giving me LIFE right now, I can’t thank you enough and I miss them so much 🥰😭

You’re most welcome!! I’m sorry I’ve been so sporadic with posting as of late. Also I’m torn because I’m sort of hooked on Motherland: Fort Salem rn and I REALLY WANNA start giffing but y’all have no idea how much GJ took over my life those first few months and I already have so much on my plateeeeee but srsly. Motherland. Fort. Salem.

[thought-i-to-myself]

Maybe re-blog some of your extraordinary Ann(e) posts to begin the week? TY in advance and hey ho! 🥰🎩

Any excuse to shamelessly reblog my own shit y’all! Sorry I’ve been so busy the past few months but #quarantinelife has brought me back to my roots. Hey Ho!!

[thought-i-to-myself]

Playing with Miss Ferrall. Very good friends now. / She sits on my knee tonight and has kissed me these three nights but I do it all very properly. 

5-6 September 1833

[thought-i-to-myself]

GENTLEMAN JACK // the gondola pin

[thought-i-to-myself]

Thank you for this amazing reply!!! Yes, I'm a lesbian and I'm just so enchanted by the fact that there was a woman just like us 150 years ago. She existed, and she was so raw and it somehow makes me feel more real myself. I don't even know how to call that feeling haha 💕

JFC. I know. Gentleman Jack aired one year ago today (in the states) and still I can’t believe I didn’t know about Anne Lister for the first 33 years of my life. DIG. FUCKING. IN. This woman is changing people’s lives, bringing them out of their shells, making them feel more alive and more authentic and most importantly, LESS ALONE. 

Not to shamelessly plug myself but since you landed on my blog, go find the Shibden After Dark podcast where my friend Mary (also a lesbian) and I discuss what a radical impact Anne Lister and Gentleman Jack has had on our lives. And then after that when you’re ready, join our FB group - there’s almost 1700 of us now, just talking. Like actually talking. Every day, with people on the other side of the world, people who have always felt different, felt like outsiders, but whom I’m lucky to consider family now. It’s a really fucking special place, and I know it’s bringing comfort to a lot of people quarantining right now, myself included. Sending hugs to wherever you are. ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

[thought-i-to-myself]

Do you think ann went down on Anne? And vice versa? Ik it's weird but I can't help but wonder if lesbian sex has changed through the centuries? Like there's so much documented history of straight sex and here I am not knowing if I could even come close to making a woman from couple Hundred years ago feel good.

Friend! Welcome to the fold! (I’m sorry, I couldn’t not.) Thank you for the ask!  Warning that this may get somewhat explicit (no surprise there) . . .

So you may know that we have 5 million words of Anne Lister’s diaries that are being decrypted and transcribed as we speak. FIVE MILLION.  And it is full of Anne’s sexcapades. You can read any of Jill Liddington’s or Helena Whitbread’s books to find tons of diary entries, but to answer your question in short, YES!  I’m not an expert by any means, but from what I’ve read, it’s pretty much what you’d expect when it comes to the type of sex Anne was having with women back then. Anne in her diary uses words/phrases like: “grubbling” aka “using her hands to bring another woman to orgasm”  - I imagine that’s touching, fondling, teasing (will get to penetration in a minute). She’ll say “kiss” instead of orgasm (e.g., “2 kisses for her last night, and a goodish one for me” - I’m paraphrasing, because #quarantineADHD). She sometimes says things like, “I wanted her to be near to me” which means no drawers (undies) closeness like grinding, rubbing, riding. And she uses the word “queer” for “vagina”, as in “we touched queers” or “then I got my right middle finger up queer.” I’m not making this up. Yes, Anne Lister would note in her diary when she used her fingers, when she used her mouth, and when they just went old school thigh-between-the-legs. (She even used a phrase for masturbating = “incurring a cross.”) To be clear, I don’t remember reading that others went down on or penetrated Anne Lister - she preferred it the other way around - but I suppose we won’t know for sure until all 5MM words are translated. . . ?

I want to say here that I know it feels weird to talk about lesbians 150 years ago having sex the same way we do with our partners today, but it ISN’T weird and it definitely SHOULDN’T feel weird but it does because we weren’t given an even playing field when it comes to representation. And that’s part of the beauty of Anne Lister and the communities that have sprung up in the wake of Gentleman Jack because finally we have a woman in history just documenting these pieces of our reality and cementing the fact that so many women have come before us (see what I did there?). Sometimes the orgasms are bad! Sometimes your lover snores afterwards! Sometimes the sheets get so wet you feel like you’re sleeping in an aquarium! 

So you didn’t tell me your story, Anon (and apologies for assuming you’re wlw if that’s not the case), but I imagine if you’re making any women feel good today (including yourself), then you’d have been more than capable of the same with women from a hundred years ago. CONGRATULATIONS!! 

PS: If you’re going to jump into the diaries - start with the Maria Barlow years. 

[kindagayandferal]

It doesn't matter what the wlw ship is, there will always be a fanfic where one of the two is portrayed as an artist

[thought-i-to-myself]

This is absolutely accurate.

[thought-i-to-myself]

Should we go upstairs?

[thought-i-to-myself]

Any possibility of a podcast with guest host Sophie Rundle in the works? I mean, she’s got nothing goin on, and she can totally hang with us.

I wake up several days a week with this on my mind. SHE HAS NOT-THAT-MUCH TO DO THESE DAYS.

Please for the love of quarantined lesbians let’s make this happen. I haven’t given it a go but obviously the co-host and I are both game. And I swear to Sapphos I will send you so much free merch (and her) if y’all can hook this up 🌈🎩🕶🤞