Stay Awhile

Just living my best life

[gaynehollander]

I just have to be honest and live my truth. I think Shane uses two-in-one shampoo and conditioner up until he and Ilya get into a relationship.

[wafflehousebutterbob]

Guys, I gave up fanfiction for Lent, but I'm not doing a very good job at it, so I think God has struck down AO3 to keep me from cheating on my fast.

I will try to do better and will pray for AO3's safe return

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

i think what makes tumblr great now is that nobody gives a shit? Like, there is NOTHING to be gained from being on here except the pure joy of making stuff for people and with people?

If you're on twitter or threads or reddit, and you say, "Oh, I had a terrible experience with Delta Airlines. They canceled my flight and then booked me into a hotel room with a stranger," and you tag Delta, there's a chance Delta Airlines itself will come and apologize. Maybe even give you some SkyMiles or something.

But if you complain about a terrible airline experience on tumblr, all you can hope for is that someone might come along and write slash fiction about two guys who get booked into the same hotel room by Delta Airlines.

You can't gain social capital by being here. Nobody knows who you even ARE because your user name is, like, some randomly generated phrase or else an obscure reference to hockey sex books.

I'm not saying it's perfect, of course. It's a super toxic hellsite that eats the ashes of its former self to survive. But it beats twitter any day, and not only because twitter is owned by a raving mad white supremacist fuckchild.

[pseudophan]

my baby's proud; sweet and devout if i'm patient one day she'll love me out loud

[djungelskogbear]

How never having seen a single Dan and Phil video feels right now

[murkycrush]

I needed this so much in my life, resisting painting it was futile. They deserve their happy ending!

[olderthannetfic]

*cackling*

If OTW weren’t around, this wouldn’t be “scaremongering”: It would be the inescapable status quo.

[lanninglurksnomore]

The people who believe this crap are the anti-vaxxers of fandom.

[olderthannetfic]

Oh god. They kind of are, aren’t they?

[athingofvikings]

I’d go bigger and just say that they’re the conservatives/reactionaries of fandom–or, to frame it differently, this is how conservative and authoritarian ideologies express themselves in the context of Fandom.

[kimberlyeab]

my opinion on AO3 is that it’s an important asset but i still find it scummy that they’ll ask for money but when their users try to ask for money they slam them with their non-monetization rules. Like Anne Rice is dead and this isn’t the 90s anymore, people are making money from fandom please catch up with the times.

[olderthannetfic]

I think you’ve misunderstood:

AO3 was built by a bunch of us with our free donated labor for the purpose of being a space free from commercial spam.

It’s not a public service. It was built by us to house the type of fandom culture we liked.

People who want to do fandom differently, including making money, are welcome to go build their own site with their own money or their own donated labor.

[elfwreck]

AO3 does not forbid commercial links because they think fans making money from fanworks is immoral but them making money (to run the damn site) is fine.

AO3 forbids commercial links because they are making a very specific claim about the legality of fanworks, and that claim is about noncommercial fanworks.

They’re not saying that commercialized fanworks are against the law. They’re just not prepared to host them–nor defend them in court.

In case people missed it: The OTW will not honor DMCA takedown orders that are basically, “I own X work and that’s a fanfic of it, and that’s copyright infringement so make it go away.”

The OTW says, lolnope, we don’t think that’s copyright infringement. If you disagree, sue us.

The OTW says: Disney - we will not remove explicit Mandalorian fanfic. Rowling, Warner Bros - we will not remove trans Harry Potter fanfic. Gabaldon - we are not removing Outlander fanfic no matter how much you think it’s illegal or a personal violation. Yarbro, if someone puts “The Adventure of the Gentleman in Black” on AO3, you will need to actually take it to trial to (try to) get it removed; none of this C&D order followed by fans caving because they can’t afford a lawyer.

…So far, nobody has sued them. (This is, in my mind, the strongest proof we have that fanfic is not copyright infringement. In 13 years, not a single person or company has scrounged up a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against AO3/the OTW for hosting fanworks.)

But they’re not willing to put themselves on the line for commercial works. Those get considered differently in copyright law. They’re not always infringing - there’s a whole history of parody books & songs to prove that - but the OTW is not dealing with them.

The OTW does not care if fans are making money. The OTW cares if fans making money interfere with its legal defense of its archive.

If you are not a copyright lawyer, your opinion about the situation is not going to be considered.

[thebibliosphere]

Also, it wasn’t just Anne Rice coming after fandom in the 90s as though this is some relic holdover terror from ancient history.

Events like Strikethrough and Boldthrough happened in the early to mid-2000s. It felt like you’d wake up every day in 2007 and find another fandom group on LJ gone. (And not just fandom groups either, important community groups for education and trauma survival were also wiped out in those purges as well.)

And while not exactly the same, Yahoo Groups–and yes Yahoo Groups was a major online fandom hub at one point–were deleted as late as 2019 with very little warning, leaving a lot of older fandom groups scrambling to back up decades worth of content.

I might be projecting, but Fanfic.net seems to be wobbling too. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out they go under in the next few years despite performing similar purges of adult content in 2012 and allowing for obnoxious ads, which made the site unusable on mobile unless you wanted to see an ad what felt like every couple of paragraphs. (It might be better now, I haven’t checked in a while.)

It has only been in very recent memory that fandom has gained any sort of foothold that isn’t poised directly over a precarious faultline that could at any moment open up and swallow entire communities whole, and a huge part of that is the volunteers at Ao3 who decided to play chicken with the likes of Anne Rice and won.

Ao3 at its core was and is built by fandom. Some people don’t like it and that’s fine, but to even suggest that the volunteers are lounging around eating peeled grapes and lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills making bank through fraud while fanfic authors are left out in the cold is beyond the scope of laughable.

[scififantasystuff]

They ask for all of that money for two reasons, one being larger than the other.

1. Employee expenses. Someone has to renew the page license, update firewalls, improve the webpage, and add beneficial features that the users are explicitly asking for. They also keep good copyright lawyers on retainer, who stay up-to-date on potential law suits and draw up legal responses to those Cease and Desist letter. That is not a nothing-expense. People deserve to be properly compensated for their labor.

2. This is the big one: Servers. I don’t know if y’all know this, but internet web pages do not have endless and infinite storage capacity. Since AO3 is ad free, it needs to come up with the money to buy and maintain servers from elsewhere, aka DONATIONS, which are willingly given.

It’s not a subscription service. Authors don’t have to pay to submit stories. There’s nothing predatory about it. If you don’t want to give, don’t give. But also don’t try and smear their name when you don’t understand a single thing about what they do for fandom and fanworks.

[olderthannetfic]

People do deserve to be properly compensated, but that’s not how AO3 runs. Almost all of the labor is donated, including those expensive tech skills and legal skills.

My biggest beef with the “I deserve a $5 coffee for my fic” thing is that the vital work of making the site exist at all is largely uncompensated. A given fic writer wouldn’t just be monetizing their own labor but that of a lot of other people who did not consent.

[cesperanza]

Yeah, I don’t think people realize–or can comprehend (!!)–that nobody gets paid–it’s all volunteer from the board on down, and even the lawyers work pro-bono. Server costs, machines, hosting for webpages for related activities, communications software, those things cost money, but the OTW is an all-volunteer nonprofit corporation. We did (I believe) once or twice hired limited-term contractors to help wit specific technical debt stuff (things about gems and stuff underlying the software, updating Rails), but the thing is mostly a giant labor of love. Because it turns out that not everyone creates awesome things  for money. As you might think an entire archive of awesome, custom-written fanfiction might prove. :D  Or to put it another way–the whole of OTW and AO3 is A FANWORK, YOU GUYS. 

[prettiestcaptain]

it’s that easy

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

Thoughts on unpaid internships?

I made you a flow chart.

[rylandsgrace]

#He did his best

[blessyouhawkeye]

bbc's merlin was literally thee most show of all time they gave us a black actress playing guinevere, one of the greatest queerbaits of our time, katie mcgrath (sword), katie mcgrath (evil), blatant disregard for any sort of historical accuracy, a queer metaphor they publicly said "didn't mean anything", and then at the end they fucking killed king arthur. truly legendary.

[stars-bean]

The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1988)

[podcastwizard]

TITS BACK ON TUMBLR???

DON’T MIND IF I DO!!!

#POST TITS

[portraitofadyke]

at least once a week i say to myself babygirl its time to get over stucky its 2022 and you hate mcu but. but. they unintentionally made such enthralling, tragic, beautiful love story that just grips you hard by your heart and never fucking lets go just keeps pulling

they made characters that revolved around each other without being anything but equal, they created this relationship that spawned over decades, from bruised knees and backyard bullies to shared apartments through the trenches to the impossible future.

they wrote a man who was good through and through, who was the most selfless man ever who would (and did) fight the whole world and walk over dead bodies to save that one man who was always there for him, to search every corner of the planet just to find him again and help him, the only selfish thing he allowed himself

they wrote a man who worshipped the ground the little ridiculed man walked on since day one but never made him feel like he was a burden, they put him through hell and erased him and still he managed to come back and find himself just because of an unintentional wedding vow.

they went through parallelling experiences without even knowing it, every part of their journey mirrored in a cruel way, they lived through something nobody else can relate to only to against all odds, find each other seventy years into the future after both of their deaths, after bucky was all but damned but steve was willing to risk everything

they wrote a beautiful love story and then they got too scared of the queerness they accidentaly created since day one these two appeared on screen and threw it all away for a cheapened story arc just to appeal to the masses and every day i think about what could have been if they werent cowards and played into that chemistry

[xxbluandorangexx]

so I’ve got this headcanon that Guardians of the Galaxy is really the Avengers playing a table top roleplaying game, where Bucky’s the DM who suffers through heaps and loads of trolling 

Mostly from Steve

Especially from Steve

[obsessiforge]

Which means Natasha was the one who sat down and wrote out the long, comprehensive backstory for her kickass space assassin Gamora, that Bucky keeps trying to work into the campaign but they keep getting sidetracked by –

Tony who just created what he sees himself as – the suave, wise-cracking space vagabond.

Thor who needed a lot of help building his character and decided on a couple easy to remember traits (Strong, honor, doesn’t get metaphors)

and Bruce who’s actually too busy to pay full attention so any time Bucky asks what he wants to do he just says “I am Groot” and lets Steve decide

[foundloveinbudapest-blog]

Oh my god.

[sperari]

Headcanon accepted so hard

[therealfeedback-deactivated2018]

“We need to break out of this prison. Bucky, do I know anything about it?”

“Roll knowledge, Steve.”

“Seventeen.”

“From your years of experience and multiple prison escapes, you believe that if you can get one of the prison guard’s security bands to get into the watchtower, and one of the power cells to overload the security systems, you should be able to pull off an escape.”

“Perfect. Nat, you have sleight of hand trained, right?”

“Yes I do, Steve.”

“Alright, you get the wristband. Bruce, grab the power cell.”

“Yeah, sure, I am Groot.”

“Even in a board game, boy scout has to give the orders, huh?”

“Alright Tony, what’s-”

“Excuse me, my name Star Lord, thank you.”

“…Alright, Star Lord. What’s your plan?”

“Well…Bucky?”

“Knowledge, Tony.”

“…Four.”

“You’ve never been in prison before, so you have no idea. You think Rocket’s plan makes sense though.”

“Alright, fine. What do you want me to do, Captain Raccoon?”

“Only the most important for you, Space King. Bucky, does anyone in the prison have a robotic arm?”

“I swear if you’re going where I think you’re going with–”

“Okay, leg. Robotic leg, not arm.”

“Yes, there is one guy with a prosthetic leg.”

“Tony I want you to get me that guy’s leg.”

“…Why?”

“Just trust me, we need it for the plan.”

“Bucky, can I sense motive on Rocket?”

“Go ahead.”

“…These dice are weighted.”

“What?”

“What’d you get, Stark?”

“One.”

“Not only do you believe that Rocket needs the leg, you believe it is the single most important part of the plan. Without that leg, everything will fall to pieces.”

“Okay, fine, I’ll get the leg.”

“Perfect. Avengers, let’s get to work.”

“Removing the power cell will set off the alarm, so you believe you should start with–”

“I go remove the power cell.”

“…Bruce, that’s…not a good idea. Like I said, ripping that out will set off the alarm.”

“Right, exactly, sounds like fun. I go to rip it out.”

“But…but I spent all week coming up with persuasion and stealth scenarios for–-”

“This is what, a strength check?”

“…Yes Bruce, it’s a strength check.”

“I got a 20.”

“…You rip out the power cell with a single tug, setting off the alarm and alerting every single guard in the prison to your escape attempt. Roll for initiative, and remember that I hate all of you.”

[pearlsasinger-deactivated202602]

his dark materials will literally always work bc every small child wants an animal companion that loves you most and goes on adventures with you and every adult wants an animal companion that can shoulder some of life’s immense psychologically damage for you. and you can pet it

[autisticexpression]

This Ao3 anti discourse actually gets really funny when you realize that they are clearly the ones going out of their way to read fucked up shit in the first place. Like one does not accidentally stumble on an original work from an orphaned account clearly tagged for underage noncon incest slavery. It just does not happen. It’s like the Salem witch trials at this point. You may well have seen Temperance at the devil’s sabbath but what the fuck were you doing there?

[autisticexpression]

Congratulations on making this even funnier

[kyraneko]

It’s like stomping on Legos barefoot and then wailing bloody murder about how harmful they are.

It’s like stomping on Legos barefoot in order to wail bloody murder about how harmful they are.

Like, the Legos in these parts are uncommonly well-lit and clearly indicated to be Legos and there’s a generous supply of non-Lego-containing areas right there to do all the barefoot stomping one might desire … if you’re stepping on Legos at this point it’s because you’re trying to stomp on Legos.