Seeing as how the Big Beautiful Bill just passed, here's are some websites that offer discounts on medications:
- GoodRx
- SingleCare
- Pharmacy Checker
- WellRx - this one compares prices across different pharmacies
- Cost Plus - thanks to @thedamnqueenofhell for suggesting!
-NeedyMeds - a nonprofit that helps pay for prescriptions. Thank you to @allitdoesispause for the suggestion! They also suggested checking the manufacturers website for a paitent assistance program, which can give you a coupon for free or cheaper meds.
-Ask for a discount card - thank you to @cccshutdown for the reminder!
Stay safe, everyone. Things are about to get much, much worse in the US.
EDIT: if you're worried about doctor/therapy appointments, see if there's a sliding scale clinic near you (and ask your therapist if they offer sliding scale prices)
Brennan Lee Mulligan arguing for the primal nature of morality on Ep. 40’s Fireside Chat is one of the funniest and realest things I’ve ever heard. He once again put into words what I have been trying to say for what feels like forever.
EDIT: No, I actually need to quote this out for myself.
“One of the things that happens a lot in philisophy that is, I think, a point of failure, potentially, in it, is that philosophy contains a lot of formal logic studies, and there’s a degree to want to sort of explicate, logically, everything, and go like, ‘What are the reasons and rationalities behind all of this?” But I think ignoring the primal origins of morality- You don’t need- If you watch someone kick a small animal, you don’t need an explanation for why that’s bad. It’s a first- It’s a primary thing, right? And you get into weird positions when you’re like, ‘I believe that humans should have good- be flourish and be happy, and have safety and joy!’ And someone can literally just go ‘Why? To what end? To what end should they have joy?’ And you’re like ‘Not to what end. I’m saying this is the end for me. The end for me is joy and safety and peace.’ And I get to say that because I’m a weird brain monster living in the universe and I can create meaning with my mind. You’re doing the same thing right now, but I just choose joy. Are you choosing something else? Because if you are, then we’re in conflict!” -Brennan Lee Mulligan, “Fireside Chat for WWW ep40 ‘Aid and Comfort’”
Choose joy, motherfucker! If you’re not, we’re in conflict!!!
I feel like there’s needs to be, like, handbook for authors who post on Ao3 for effective metatext.
By metatext I mean like tagging, summary, and authors notes (especially initial authors notes at the beginning of a fic). The means by which we communicate to our readers what they’re getting into.
Because we kind of all have to learn it by osmosis and there are conventions but nobody’s really taught them at the start, so there’s inconsistencies and misunderstandings or people just not knowing things through no fault of their own.
This ends up breeding frustration and confusion and in the worst cases resentment, hurt, and aggression.
I’m severely tempted to make such a handbook and get it circulating.
if you are a cat owner do you let your cat sleep with you ???
YES !!!! HONK SHNOO LITTLE KITTY TIME !!
NOOO !!! NO BEASTS IN THE BEDROOM!!!!!!!!
no cat / im bald / etc
Voting ended onJun 14, 2024
if u let ur cat sleep w u PLEASE tell me why in the tags. if i let keppy sleep with w us we would wake up 1000x a night. banishment to downstairs with you foul creature
So I finally decided to archive-lock my fics on AO3 last night. I’ve been considering it since the AI scrape last year, but the tipping point was this whole lore.fm debacle, coupled with some thoughts I’ve been thinking regarding Fandom These Days in general and Fandom As A Community in particular. So I wanna explain why I waited so long, why I locked my stuff up now, and why I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a-okay with making it harder for people to see my stories.
Lurkers really are great, tho
I’m a chronic lurker, and have been since I started hanging out on the internet as a teen in the 00s. These days it’s just cuz I don’t feel a need to socialize very often, but back then it was because I was shy and knew I was socially awkward. Even if I made an account, I’d spend months lurking on message boards or forums or Livejournals, watching other people interact and getting a feel for that particular community’s culture and etiquette before I finally started interacting myself. And y’know, that approach saved me a lot of embarrassment. Over the course of my lurking on any site, there was always some other person who’d clearly joined up five minutes after learning the place existed, barged in without a care for their behavior, and committed so many social faux pas that all the other users were immediately annoyed with them at best. I learned a lot observing those incidents. Lurk More is Rule 33 of the internet for very good reason.
Lurking isn’t bad or weird or creepy. It’s perfectly normal. I love lurking. It’s hard for me to not lurk - socializing takes a lot of energy out of me, even via text. (Heck it took 12 hours for me to write this post, I wish I was kidding--) Occasionally I’ll manage longer bouts of interaction - a few weeks posting here, almost a year chatting in a discord there - but I’m always gonna end up going radio silent for months at some point. I used to feel bad about it, but I’ve long since made peace with the fact that it’s just the way my brain works. I’m a chronic lurker, and in the long term nothing is going to change that.
The thing with being a chronic lurker is that you have to accept that you are not actually seen as part of the community you are lurking in. That’s not to say that lurkers are unimportant - lurkers actually are important, and they make up a large proportion of any online community - but it’s simple cause and effect. You may think of it as “your community”, but if you’ve never said a word, how is the community supposed to know you exist? If I lurked on someone’s LJ, and then that person suddenly friendslocked their blog, I knew that I had two choices: Either accept that I would never be able to read their posts again, or reach out to them and ask if I could be added to their friends list with the full understanding that I was a rando they might not decide to trust. I usually went with the first option, because my invisibility as a lurker was more important to me than talking to strangers on the internet.
Lurking is like sitting on a park bench, quietly people-watching and eavesdropping on the conversations other people are having around you. You’re in the park, but you’re not actively participating in anything happening there. You can see and hear things that you become very interested in! But if you don’t introduce yourself and become part of the conversation, you won’t be able to keep listening to it when those people walk away. When fandom migrated away from Livejournal, people moved to new platforms alongside their friends, but lurkers were often left behind. No one knew they existed, so they weren’t told where everyone else was going. To be seen as part of a fandom community, you need to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known, etc. etc.
There’s nothing wrong with lurking. There can actually be benefits to lurking, both for the lurkers and the communities they lurk in. It’s just another way to be in a fandom. But if that is how you exist in fandom--and remember, I say this as someone who often does exist that way in fandom--you need to remember that you’re on the outside looking in, and the curtains can always close.
I’ve always been super sympathetic to lurkers, because I am one. I know there’s a lot of people like me who just don’t socialize often. I know there’s plenty of reasons why someone might not make an account on the internet - maybe they’re nervous, maybe they’re young and their parents don’t allow them to, maybe they’re in a bad situation where someone is monitoring their activity, maybe they can only access the internet from public computer terminals. Heck, I’ve never even logged into AO3 on my phone--if I’m away from my computer I just read what’s publicly available.
I know I have people lurking on my fics. I know my fics probably mean a lot to someone I don’t even know exists. I know this because there are plenty of fics I love whose writers don’t know I exist.
I love my commenters personally; I love my lurkers as an abstract concept. I know they’re there and I wish them well, and if they ever de-lurk I love them all the more.
So up until last year I never considered archive-locking my fic, because I get it. The AI scraping was upsetting, but I still hesitated because I was thinking of lurkers and guests and remembering what it felt like to be 15 and wondering if it’d be worth letting a stranger on the internet know I existed and asking to be added to their friends list just so I could reread a funny post they made once.
But the internet has changed a lot since the 00s, and fandom has changed with it. I’ve read some things and been doing some thinking about fandom-as-community over the last few years, and reading through the lore.fm drama made me decide that it’s time for me to set some boundaries.
I still love my lurkers, and I feel bad about leaving any guest commenters behind, especially if they’re in a situation where they can’t make an account for some reason. But from here on out, even my lurkers are going to have to do the bare minimum to read my fics--make an AO3 account.
Should we gatekeep fandom?
I’ve seen a few people ask this question, usually rhetorically, sometimes as a joke, always with a bit of seriousness. And I think…yeah, maybe we should. Except wait, no, not like that--
A decade ago, when people talked about fandom gatekeeping and why it was bad to do, it intersected with a lot of other things, mainly feminism and classism. The prevalent image of fandom gatekeeping was, like, a man learning that a woman likes Star Wars and haughtily demanding, “Oh, yeah? Well if you’re REALLY a fan, name ten EU novels” to belittle and dismiss her, expecting that a “real fan” would have the money and time to be familiar with the EU, and ignoring the fact that male movie-only fans were still considered fans. The thing being gatekept was the very definition of “being a fan” and people’s right to describe themselves as one.
That’s not what I mean when I say maybe fandom should gatekeep more. Anyone can call themselves a fan if they like something, that’s fine. But when it comes to the ability to enjoy the fanworks produced by the fandom community…that might be something worth gatekeeping.
See, back in the 00s, it was perfectly common for people to just…not go on the internet. Surfing the web was a thing, but it was just, like, a fun pastime. Not everyone did it. It wasn’t until the rise of social media that going online became a thing everyone and their grandmother did every day. Back then, going on the internet was just…a hobby.
So one of the first gates online fandom ever had was the simple fact that the entire world wasn’t here yet.
The entire world is here now. That gate has been demolished.
And it’s a lot easier to find us now. Even scattered across platforms, fandom is so centralized these days. It isn’t a network of dedicated webshrines and forums that you can only find via webrings anymore, it’s right there on all the big social media sites. AO3 didn’t set out to be the main fanfic website, but that’s definitely what it’s become. It’s easy for people to find us--and that includes people who don’t care about the community, and just want “content.”
Transformative fandom doesn’t like it when people see our fanworks as “content”. “Content” is a pretty broad term, but when fandom uses it we’re usually referring to creative works that are churned out by content creators to be consumed by an audience as quickly as possible as often as possible so that the content creator can generate revenue. This not-so-new normal has caused a massive shift in how people who are new to fandom view fanworks--instead of seeing fic or art as something a fellow fan made and shared with you, they see fanworks as products to be consumed.
Transformative fandom has, in general, always been a gift economy. We put time and effort into creating fanworks that we share with our fellow fans for free. We do this so we don’t get sued, but fandom as a whole actually gets a lot out of the gift economy. Offer your community a story, and in return you can get comments, build friendships, or inspire other people to write things that you might want to read. Readers are given the gift of free stories to read and enjoy, and while lurking is fine, they have the choice to engage with the writer and other readers by leaving comments or making reclists to help build the community.
And look, don’t get me wrong. People have never engaged with fanfic as much as fan writers wish they would. There has always been “no one comments anymore” wank. There have always been people who only comment to say “MORE!” or otherwise demand or guilt trip writers into posting the next chapter. But fandom has always agreed that those commenters are rude and annoying, and as those commenters navigate fandom they have the chance to learn proper community etiquette.
However, now it seems that a lot of the people who are consuming fanworks aren’t actually in the community.
I won’t say “they aren’t real fans” because that’s silly; there’s lots of ways to be a fan. But there seem to be a lot of fans now who have no interest in fandom as a community, or in adhering to community etiquette, or in respecting the gift economy. They consume our fics, but they don’t appreciate fan labor. They want our “content”, but they don’t respect our control over our creations.
And even worse--they see us as a resource. We share our work for free, as a gift, but all they see is an open-source content farm waiting to be tapped into. We shared it for free, so clearly they can do whatever they want with it. Why should we care if they feed our work into AI training datasets, or copy/paste our unfinished stories into ChatGPT to get an ending, or charge people for an unnecessary third-party AO3 app, or sell fanbindings on etsy for a profit without the author’s permission, or turn our stories into poor imitations of podfics to be posted on other platforms without giving us credit or asking our consent, while also using it to lure in people they can datascrape for their Forbes 30 Under 30 company?
And sure, people have been doing shady things with other people’s fanworks since forever. Art theft and reposting has always been a big problem. Fanfic is harder to flat-out repost, but I’ve heard of unauthorized fic translations getting posted without crediting the original author. Once in…I think the 2010s? I read a post by a woman who had gone to some sort of local bookselling event, only to find that the man selling “his” novel had actually self-published her fanfic. (Wish I could find that one again, I don’t even remember where I read it.)
But aside from that third example, the thing is…as awful as fanart/writing theft is, back in the day, the main thing a thief would gain from it was clout. Clout that should rightfully go to the creators who gifted their work in the first place, yeah, but still. Just clout. People will do a lot of hurtful things for clout, but fandom clout means nothing outside of fandom. Fandom clout is not enough to incentivize the sort of wide-scale pillaging we’re seeing from community outsiders today.
Money, on the other hand… Well, fandom’s just a giant, untapped content farm, isn’t it? Think of how much revenue all that content could generate.
Lurkers are a normal and even beneficial part of any online community. Maybe one day they’ll de-lurk and easily slide into place beside their fellow fans because they already know the etiquette. Maybe they’re active in another community, and they can spread information from the community they lurk in to the community they’re active in. At the very least, they silently observe, and even if they’re not active community members, they understand the community.
Fans who see fanworks as “content” don’t belong in the same category as lurkers. They’re tourists.
While reading through the initial Reddit thread on the lore.fm situation, I found this comment:
[ID: Reddit User Cabbitowo says: ... So in anime fandoms we have a word called tourist and essentially it means a fan of a few anime and doesn't care about anime tropes and actively criticizes them. This is kind of how fandoms on tiktok feel. They're touring fanfics and fanart and actively criticizes tropes that have been in the fandom since the 60s. They want to be in a fandom but they don't want to engage in fandom
OP totallymandy responds: Just entered back into Reddit after a long day to see this most recent reply. And as a fellow anime fan this making me laugh so much since it’s true! But it sorta hurts too when the reality sets in. Modern fandom is so entitled and bratty and you’d think it’s the minors only but that’s not even true, my age-mates and older seem to be like that. They want to eat their cake and complain all whilst bringing nothing to the potluck… :/ END ID]
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“Tourist” is an apt name for this sort of fan. They don’t want to be part of our community, and they don’t have to be in order to come into our spaces and consume our work. Even if they don’t steal our work themselves, they feel so entitled to it that they’re fine with ignoring our wishes and letting other people take it to make AI “podfics” for them to listen to (there are a lot of comments on lore.fm’s shutdown announcement video from people telling them to just ignore the writers and do it anyway). They’ll use AI to generate an ending to an unfinished fic because they don’t care about seeing “the ending this writer would have given to the story they were telling”, they just want “an ending”. For these tourist fans, the ends justify the means, and their end goal is content for them to consume, with no care for the community that created it for them in the first place.
I don’t think this is confined to a specific age group. This isn’t “13-year-olds on Wattpad” or “Zoomers on TikTok” or whatever pointless generation war we’re in now. This is coming from people who are new to fandom, whose main experience with creative works on the internet is this new content culture and who don’t understand fandom as a community. That description can be true of someone from any age group.
It’s so easy to find fandom these days. It is, in fact, too easy. Newcomers face no hurdles or challenges that would encourage them to lurk and observe a bit before engaging, and it’s easy for people who would otherwise move on and leave us alone to start making trouble. From tourist fans to content entrepreneurs to random people who just want to gawk, it’s so easy for people who don’t care about the fandom community to reap all of its fruits.
So when I say maybe fandom should start gatekeeping a bit, I’m referring to the fact that we barely even have a gate anymore. Everyone is on the internet now; the entire world can find us, and they don’t need to bother learning community etiquette when they do. Before, we were protected by the fact that fandom was considered weird and most people didn’t look at it twice. Now, fandom is pretty mainstream. People who never would’ve bothered with it before are now comfortable strolling in like they own the place. They have no regard for the fandom community, they don’t understand it, and they don’t want to. They want to treat it just like the rest of the content they consume online.
And then they’re surprised when those of us who understand fandom culture get upset. Fanworks have existed far longer than the algorithmic internet’s content. Fanworks existed long before the internet. We’ve lived like this for ages and we like it.
So if someone can’t be bothered to respect fandom as a community, I don’t see why I should give them easy access to my fics.
Think of it like a garden gate
When I interact with commenters on my fic, I have this sense of hospitality.
The comment section is my front porch. The fic is my garden. I created my garden because I really wanted to, and I’m proud of it, and I’m happy to share it with other people.
Lots of people enjoy looking at my garden. Many walk through without saying anything. Some stop to leave kudos. Some recommend my garden to their friends. And some people take the time to stop by my front porch and let me know what a beautiful garden it is and how much they’ve enjoyed it.
Any fic writer can tell you that getting comments is an incredible feeling. I always try to answer all my comments. I don’t always manage it, but my fics’ comment sections are the one place that I manage to consistently socialize in fandom. When I respond to a comment, it feels like I’m pouring out a glass of lemonade to share with this lovely commenter on my front porch, a thank you for their thank you. We take a moment to admire my garden together, and then I see them out. The next time they drop by, I recognize them and am happy to pour another glass of lemonade.
My garden has always been open and easy to access. No fences, no walls. You just have to know where to find it. Fandom in general was once protected by its own obscurity, an out-of-the-way town that showed up on maps but was usually ignored.
But now there’s a highway that makes it easy to get to, and we have all these out-of-towner tourists coming in to gawk and steal our lawn ornaments and wonder if they can use the place to make themselves some money.
I don’t care to have those types trampling over my garden and eating all my vegetables and digging up my flowers to repot and sell, so I’ve put up a wall. It has a gate that visitors can get through if they just take the time to open it.
Admittedly, it’s a small obstacle. But when I share my fics, I share them as a gift with my fellow fans, the ones who understand that fandom is a community, even if they’re lurkers. As for tourist fans and entrepreneurs who see fic as content, who have no qualms ignoring the writer’s wishes, who refuse to respect or understand the fandom community…well, they’re not the people I mean to share my fic with, so I have no issues locking them out. If they want access to my stories, they’ll have to do the bare minimum to become a community member and join the AO3 invite queue.
And y’know, I’ve said a lot about fandom and community here, and I just want to say, I hope it’s not intimidating. When I was younger, talk about The Fandom Community made me feel insecure, and I didn’t think I’d ever manage to be active enough in fandom spaces to be counted as A Member Of The Community. But you don’t have to be a social butterfly to participate in fandom. I’ll always and forever be a chronic lurker, I reblog more than I post, I rarely manage to comment on fic, and I go radio silent for months at a time--but I write and post fanfiction. That’s my contribution.
Do you write, draw, vid, gif, or otherwise create? Congrats, you're a community member.
Do you leave comments? Congrats, you're a community member.
Do you curate reclists? Congrats, you're a community member.
Do you maintain a fandom blog or fuckyeah blog? Congrats, you're a community member.
Do you provide a space for other fans to convene in? Congrats, you're a community member.
Do you regularly send asks (off anon so people know who you are)? Congrats, you're a community member.
Do you have fandom friends who you interact with? Congrats, you're a community member.
There’s lots of ways to be a fan. Just make sure to respect and appreciate your fellow fans and the work they put in for you to enjoy and the gift economy fandom culture that keeps this community going.
"So when I say maybe fandom should start gatekeeping a bit, I’m referring to the fact that we barely even have a gate anymore. Everyone is on the internet now; the entire world can find us, and they don’t need to bother learning community etiquette when they do. Before, we were protected by the fact that fandom was considered weird and most people didn’t look at it twice. Now, fandom is pretty mainstream. People who never would’ve bothered with it before are now comfortable strolling in like they own the place. They have no regard for the fandom community, they don’t understand it, and they don’t want to. They want to treat it just like the rest of the content they consume online."
I just want to highlight this paragraph OP wrote because I think it's so so critical and it's something I've been trying hard to articulate to myself and in conversations with others. I am that person that's joked 'maybe we should start gatekeeping' but it's not a joke anymore.
This Google Drive AI scraping bullshit actually makes me want to cry. My entire life is packed into Google Drive. All of my writing over the years, all of my academic documents, everything.
I’m just so overwhelmed with all the shit I’m going to have to move. I’m lucky to have Scrivener, but online data storage has been super important as I’ve had so many shitty computers, and the only reason I haven’t lost work is because Google Drive has been my backup storage unit.
My partner has recommended gitlab to move my files to - it seems useful, and I can try and explain more about what it is and how it works when I get more familiar with it. I’m unsure if it’s a text editor, or can work that way. He was explaining something about the version history that I don’t quite understand right now but might later. I’m just super overwhelmed and frustrated that this is the dystopia we live in right now.
I’m so sad to see so many panicked posts about google docs when the original inflammatory post has been debunked and retracted.
Google is ONLY talking about publicly available data. Stuff that is in your drive DOES NOT COUNT as publicly available.
There are SO MANY companies that use drive and docs for proprietary information who would have MANY lawsuits to bring if it was discovered private drives were being scraped.
Now, I’m not saying NOT to swap writing programs because google docs is pretty pants as an actual word processor, and also, never ever have all your stuff only in one place, but I don’t want anyone to freak out that their writing isn’t safe.
cryptpad.fr is an encrypted online word processor that can also act as a cloud for all sorts of file formats. I used this for a couple years and still keep some backups there.
LibreOffice is an offline word processor that offers more convenience than cryptpad, and together with the free cloudspace from Protonmail, this is a safe and secure alternative to GoogleDocs that has all the convenience minus the dependency from Google. This is the combo I use today, and the only drawback I can so far spot is that I have to upload my files manually to the cloud. That’s literally it. I’ll never return to GoogleDocs.
I know I'm a broken record at this point about how functionally useless editing software has become since AI integration (read: corrections are now being suggested based on user input, not actual grammar rules), but there's nothing quite like a piece of writing software flagging something you've written as an error, and then when you click on it, it can't tell you what the error is.
Just that it thinks something is wrong.
It's like the writing equivalent of the "you better watch out!" meme.
Watch our for what? Nobody knows, but you better watch out!
i did manage to dig into Word's files and delete the AI, which was...a fairly simple process, all things considered. Here's the file path for anyone interested in doing some DIY on Microsoft Word:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16
Primary target: A folder titled "AI". This contains most of the actual AI. You can just delete it.
Secondary targets, for completionists and vindictive people: AI.exe and all the files with names that start with "AI." There's another file called MLG.dll that you can snipe too.
(the secondary targets shouldn't be too hard to find, but don't worry too much about them. They can't really do much without all the shit in the AI folder you just got rid of)
Disable automatic updates from the options menu, and you're done. If you're worried about breaking something, move the files to the recycle bin, then test to see if the program works. If it fucks up, you can just restore the relevant files.
Yes I like OC with names, not this y/n crap as it is just power fantasy in my eye as a writer of a y/n fic will more likely write the standard shit ( harem, chosen one, giving the 'protag' trauma but not letting them keep said trauma, and not caring for the world that they are writing except when it is good for the y/n) and not having any value to them as it is a power fantasy that a writer don't care about, but having a oc with name gives it value as for example I am currently making a au and I give the 3 OC that time traveled name ( Luka Hall, Alfred Banks,and Mikey Graves) and that give them character values as I gave Luka trauma ( seeing his sister dies and nearly overdosed and died on enhanced trigger) and Luka keeps said trauma and it has consequences like refusing to take drugs and when he any person who looked like his dead sister about to be seriously harmed, Luka will stop everything he is doing and save them.
Long story short, y/n feel like a thing that has no value despite the writer doing everything they can to give it value but It feels like y/n is not part of the world and more likely to be a mary stu. and OC with name, even background OC, has value as it feels like a person from the world people are writing and can have history that people can like or hate.
Y’all misinterpreted this post, I literally meant the use of y/n in character x reader fics because I don’t like the way having to pause and read “y/n” in a sentence halts the train of thought. I write both x reader and OC. Neither is inherently better, nor is one more intellectual than the other. It wasn’t this deep 🥴
Exactly this. I love reader x character fics, I think they're fun but the second my eyeballs are assaulted "y/n" "e/c" "h/c" or anything like that I will nope right out of the fic. Even if it's amazing and well-written! But the whole "y/n" thing is so very jarring to read.
Edit: I also agree that OC fics aren't inherently better than reader fics. I love them both
10/10 Would NOT recommend this Timeline @yarn-n-cats - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
