I work at a Pride Center. My coworkers are amazing and I learn a lot of stuff there. So I’m thinking, what the hell, this is my blog I’ll do what I want. This’ll just be a series of text posts documenting my experiences there. Advice I have, funny stories, things I would have done differently, skillsets to learn, all relating to advocacy and the queer community.
(Please keep in mind that everything here is strictly my opinion based on my own experiences.)
what is fanfiction if not a vehicle for us to process all our mental health issues?
hobbits have a vast bureaucracy dedicated solely to keeping track of their shire’s genders. they have entire libraries devoted solely to sorting, divaricating, and categorizing them. the gender spectrum to them is really more like an 11th-dimensional venn diagram. hobbit scientists have identified over 35 “fundamental particles” of gender, yet theorize of many more. orcs have one gender they call it “Crash”
elves don’t quite get the purpose of it all? they only use gendered pronouns when around outsiders. dwarf genders are associated strongly with various minerals. they’re extremely confused by humans not being able to identify as igneous or sedimentary
gnomes have a special tree under their hats that produces a single “hormone berry” every day, in whatever flavor they prefer
God no please don't give me this brainrot this idea is amazing and hilarious, I'm begging you do not curse me with the urge to write an entire crackfic about this I simply do not have the time.
"why do you know that" i am curious about the world around me
Alternatively: fanfic research
Adding "This is my real-life area of expertise but I'm trying to put in what I think is a normal amount of detail so no one knows. I'm just really bad about guessing what a normal amount of general knowledge in this area entails."
I love opening up this website first thing like the morning paper and immediately seeing multiple posts like "how to get rid of the evil clown on the dashboard". like oh is this what we're doing today
I'm gonna start adding this to every post I see about this advertising bs that tumblr are pulling
not only is it annoying, and in some countries probably illegal for not declaring a paid partnership
TUMBLR IS CROSSING THE PICKET LINE
They are taking money from Netflix to promote a show.
Actors and writers are unable to promote work because of the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.
Netflix is under the AMPTP, so it is a struck company, making One Piece a struck work.
So they are using alternate ways of promoting their products, including paying companies like tumblr.
Both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA have made statements saying that they consider anyone or company taking payment to promote struck work as crossing the picket line.
Tumblr is spitting in the face of struggling actors and writers to make a quick buck from Netflix
Reblog to send Tumblr to hell for crossing the picket line
Voting for Democrats is the "leaving the house, getting some exercise, and drinking more water is good for your mental health" of societal change. Everyone keeps telling you to do it, worst of all your mom keeps telling you to do it, and it's not a magical cure-all, but it actually works and rotting in your room shitposting does not help in either scenario.
Also like mental health, voting doesn't solve the whole problem! But if you aren't doing this bare minimum thing, the other tools you have aren't going to work as well as they should either. If you get medicine and continue rotting in your room shitposting, you will probably still be miserable. If you get a union at work but don't vote for politicians who support unions, the union won't be able to advocate for its members as effectively and work will still be miserable.
The idea of dragons in modern times is so fun because imagine a hot summer day on your vacay and go to use the hotel pool and staff is like "valued guests we regret to inform you that the pool area is out of service at the moment, we apologize for the inconvenience"
And people like "wtf why" looking out their hotel room window and there's this. This dragon just curled up in the pool chilling, literally, cooling itself down
Some of the staff are trying to gently shoo him away and the dragon does a soft little "rrrrrr" like a grumpy cat and a warning puff of smoke and they're like "fuck it i don't get paid nearly enough for this" and no ones using the pool today sorry!
looking down..
Y'all have heard of The Premise, right?
See, historically there have always been people who saw an extra layer of gayness on certain pairs of fictional people (you just thought of several), and people Back Then even wrote their own fanfic (or as they were called at the time, "pastiches"), but the first widespread queer fanwork to really define the fanfiction genre was KIRK AND SPOCK. Kirk/Spock. K/S. The very first slashfics.
Why this work was vastly, overwhelmingly written by straight women is a discussion for another time, but it was, so that's the main perspective I'm gonna consider here.
How do you - a statistically middle-class, 30+, stay-at-home wife and mother - how do you write slashfic ao3-style in the 1960's before the internet?
Carefully.
Through letters with friends, phone calls, pen pals, and sometimes - sometimes - clandestine meetings of small groups. Whole novels were written communally, round-robin style, by sending typed or handwritten additions chapter by chapter to each other. These were all underground, some deep underground; even the early Trekkie fanzines of the time wouldn't touch them.
And keep in mind, few of these stories were explicitly even sexual! But they were all about a very, very close relationship between two men. In the 1960's.
Guess how cool everyone else was about this.
Actually, for their part, Gene Rodenberry and the other writers were fine with it, saying that they had deliberately written the characters to be two halves of a whole, and if you wanna read it that way, yeah sure, go right ahead. Shatner and Nimoy took it all in good humor, and seemingly still do, each guy basically gesturing to the other and chuckling "I mean, who wouldn't?"
But elsewhere there was vicious backlash against The Premise, and not just within the fandom. This was still at a time in the US and UK when various "sodomy" and "decency" laws made no distinction between homosexual sex acts and just, like, directly lighting another man's cigarette with your cigarette in public. (That, sadly, is not a fucking joke.)
It was probably the closest some suburban cishet women came to understanding the pain of being in the closet. They had to protect this secret from their friends and family at all cost. There were cases of divorces where women lost custody of their children because their writing had come to light.
Can you imagine having such a burning desire to write for your OTP that you were willing to lose everything over it? Even if you were never caught, you still had to be willing to wait weeks, months, to receive a letter in the mail that you had to carefully intercept, read in secret, and then add your own chapter t, also in secret, and then send off, perhaps never to be seen again.
These people were goddamn heroes, and they laid the foundation for the world we live in today. A world where we can read, write, comment on, or share - in a matter of seconds! - literature about two background characters from two different franchises enjoying a really specific kink involving vacuums or something. And that's objectively amazing.
This is important and should have more notes.
“I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pickup truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”
Danusha Laméris, Small Kindness
Okay so Victorian erotica is literally the most heinous, morally bankrupt, horrific shit I've ever read - but I've read a fair bit, partly from historical interest but also because a while back I helped a friend with a university project she was doing about censorship and pornography in 19th century England.
Anyway I need to share with you all the most hilarious line that has ever been written, circa 1887:
I feel like this excerpt is significantly enhanced by knowing that the novel in question is a first-person narrative written from the perspective of an inexplicably sapient flea who lives on Bella's body, and that's why the third priest's penis is described in this way: from the narrator's perspective it literally blots out the sky.
my brother started calling our cat "doobie brother" which he then lengthened to "dubious brother" and has since morphed into "brother dubious" like he's some sort of fucked up little monk
brother dubious
"My liege, I'm afraid I have reason to believe your concubine plots against you. Worry not, your eminence, you can still trust me, of course..."
*explaining kitchen appliances to my pet medieval knights* The microwave, or Micheal the Wavious, and metal fork, or Sir Silver Prong, are sworn enemies and can never cross paths lest their meeting spell destruction for all.
“forsooth! the scribe lies to us! upon this day i swear these star-crossed lovers shall meet again”
i am begging you all to stop treating this site like instagram if you dont want it to be content free by next year
actually i'm reblogging this again with commentary, fuck it.
There's people in the notes talking about "not basing your worth off numbers", and like. that isn't what this post is about. It's not a threat, either, it's a comment on how this site works, at a mechanical level.
Likes are worthless. Let me say that again.
They don't do anything. They're a bookmark. They were never part of how tumblr works - in the early days we didn't even have a like button, and the site still more or less acts as though we don't. They're personal bookmarks and the only people who "get" anything from them are you (you bookmark the post) and the OP (maybe a very slight serotonin boost), but they don't keep the post in circulation, they don't keep it alive.
Without reblogs, a post will be dead in the water within an hour. No matter how good it is, no matter how many hours of painstaking love and attention its creator put into it, it will be dead within an hour and never seen again. It gets pushed down the dashboard and nobody aside from the followers who were online when it was posted will see it. And there's a huge difference in engagement on posts that get even one lucky reblog from someone with wider reach - that one reblog shows your post to five, ten, fifteen other people, and if one of those people also reblogs it, and so on and so forth, that's how posts stay alive and in circulation. It's like a contagion, but we're sharing creativity instead of disease.
And that matters. That "lifespan" of the post matters, artists and writers give up on this site and go to sites where posts have longer lifespans because it sucks to spend hours of your life, maybe even days, to get two notes and some fucking pocket lint for your efforts. We create for ourselves, but we share because we want people to see it, because that engagement offers positive feedback and encouragement to continue. But more than that, if every post (whether art, fic, gifset, whatever) is dying within an hour or a day of being posted, that means it's not making it onto your dashboard. And if it's not on your dashboard, you won't see it. This kills the site, after a while. You stop seeing the posts, because nobody is putting them on your dashboard, because this site doesn't have an algorithm like twitter and insta's and it shouldn't, it's the last bastion of chronological timelines.
Forgive my giant fucking rant I am so tired right now and full of the plague but like stop acting like artists and writers are just being whiny little babies, or "threatening" to withhold our fucking work (you're not entitled to it! it's ours! if we get nothing out of sharing it we're well within our rights to keep it private!) when we say this site will dry up without reblogs. We're just stating facts.
also I’ve seen some people in the tags say ‘oh there have always been more likes on posts’ no there haven’t ????
these are posts from 2013, look at the ratio
not to sound like a nursing home resident but back then people know that the point of this site was to reblog things and share them, not to bury them away among your other 23k liked posts
Reblog reblog reblog reblog. Everytime I see someone like my posts, I think to myself yea but you could a reblogged it too.
If you like a post, trust me it feels better to have it be reblogged. That way it's a rolling dopamine fractal instead of a stupid little heart nobody else sees.
Because apparently some people still can’t get it through their thick heads that tagging is a courtesy and not a must, I made a compilation of what AO3 has to say about tags in their ToS.
Most of this is about the Archive Warnings, but I’ve found that there is little difference in the use between them and the General Tags.
the ToS FAQ in question:
Tagging and rating is ENTIRELY up to the creator’s discretion.
Creators are, of course, encouraged by AO3 to use the appropriate ratings and warnings. But they are not required.
I highlighted a line in blue to also show what exactly is most encouraged to warn. People treating trivial tags like “Top [character]” as triggering content for them is invalidating towards the actual triggering content, i.e suicide, sexual harassment, and abuse.
Even then, Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings and Not-Rated exist if a creator simply chooses to not use certain tags.
Readers are not entitled to tell creators how to tag their own works.
As highlighted (in blue), the only reason AO3 may decide to intervene is if an Archive Warning is misleading. Which means if a work has content from any of the Archive Warnings and is not tagged with them. Not even with the “Choose Not To Use Warnings”.
It’s the readers’ responsibility, not the creators’, to exclude the latter warning from their search if they do not wish to come across works that may have content from the other warnings.
You can see what AO3 says about it here:
I will clarify that this is still about the Archive Warnings. Which are Major Character Death, Underage, Rape/Non-Con, and Graphic Depictions of Violence. If any of these aren’t included in a work that contains it, but the work does include “Choose To Not Use Warnings”, rules have not been broken.
AO3 can update fanworks as they see fit if they lack any of the categories highlighted in blue.
Nowhere does it say that they will add “Top [character]” just because the work contains it. That’s still the creator’s prerogative.
What's not okay is complaining in creators' comments demanding tags they chose not to include, and then crying about it elsewhere when they're denied.
People create things because they're passionate about it. Art is about sharing what the creator likes, freely given. Views and hits should never be the primary goal of creating. Feedback is nice, sure, but when it's the only thing people think the creator cares about, then we may have a problem. Nothing lasts if what we only care about is what other people have to say.
Each one of us is responsible of curating our own internet experiences. Not giving grief to others when they post things we do not like.
I think I’m heading in the right direction of scary Techno? How about that pre-doomsday confrontation.
