About the AO3 "No Guest Comments for a while" warning

If you're not following any of AO3's social media accounts you might be in the dark as to what kind of "spam comments" have engendered this banner at the top of the site:

These spam comments have been posted about a great deal on the AO3 subreddit for the past couple of days. Initially they comprised a bunch of guest (logged out users) bot comments that insulted authors by suggesting they were using AI and not writing their own fics. Some examples, from the subreddit:

But it then escalated to outright graphic porn images and gifs being posted in comments, again by logged out 'Guest' accounts. Obviously, I'm not going to give examples of those, but between these two bot infestations, AO3 has clearly decided to act and has temporarily closed the ability to post comments for users who are not logged in with an AO3 account.

Unfortunately, this means that genuine readers who don't have an AO3 account won't be able to leave comments on fics that they enjoy.

If you are a genuine reader who doesn't yet have an AO3 account, I strongly suggest getting yourself on the waiting list for one. More and more AO3 authors are now locking their fics down to registered users only - either due to these bot comments or concerns about AI scraping their work - which means you're probably missing out on a lot of great stuff.

Hopefully guest commenting will be enabled again at some point soon, but I suggest not waiting until then. Get yourself on that list.

Wait times are going to be longer than usual at the moment, due to the current Wattpad purge [info on Fanlore | Wattpad subreddit thread], but if you're in line, then your invite will come through eventually.

Update: There's now a Megathread about this on the AO3 subreddit.

One of my favorite parts of Endwalker is Emet-Selch seeing the Ghost WoL, immediately clocking it as Azem Something and going No, Not Today Satan while Hythlodaeus is sitting down beside the Ghost WoL and making pspspspsp noises at them and offering them free hugs and Emet's Aether and giving Emet the biggest wettest puppy dog eyes of Can We Keep Them?

Meanwhile WoL is having some emotional whiplash and an existential crisis.

Here lies paradise

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.  –Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

making a collection

💫 It's okay to write fiction you would not want your grandmother to see.

💫 Different stories are for different audiences.

💫 You do not have to appeal to everyone.

💫 Don't sacrifice the story you want to tell for an imaginary audience or for imaginary critics.

Early results skewing largely to the newest animation on here, based on this I desperately need all late millennials to understand what a dark and demented place the internet was pre-2005

The days of our years gone,

Our souls soaked in sin.

Ok it's very funny to laugh at Tuxedo Mask for showing up and doing nothing, but his job was never to actually fight the monsters.

His job was just to show up and believe in Sailor Moon so overwhelmingly resolutely that she remembers she's a fucking demigod long enough for HER to fight the monsters.

Because she's the only one strong enough to do it in the first place, and in this regard Tuxedo Mask is the first example of being "Kenough" in this essay I will

@kawaiipinkbunny is so right for this

this seems self-centered you know “stereotypical American bs” but I’m curious

Launching my first art blogs with a small comic based on the amazing words of Ursula K. Le Guin!

The old school lack of transparency on tumblr is amazing because you assume the people you follow must all be equivalent to you and then you see someone write “I brought my youngest to college today” and someone else write “my mom wouldn’t let me listen to Ariana Grande when I was a kid” and then your head explodes

and we need that! keeps us humble. 

Then I'm just like WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU’RE AN ADULT

It goes the other way, too, because WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE A CHILD?!!

I'm 16, that's like, barely a child

I'm in my 30s. You are baby

I'm older than both of you in a trenchcoat.

honestly one of the best things we can do for ourselves is realize that people of different ages than us can still be the same kind of person as us. it's humbling and it gives everyone involved a sense of continuity, and it busts those stupid generational stereotypes media is so fond of.

I feel like a lot of people don’t quite get what a butler is. The role tends to get rounded off to ‘male servant’ pretty regularly in some media, whereas actually butlers are typically not just servants but chief servants. The butler was generally in charge of either all male servants or just all servants, period, in the household of an aristocrat or other very wealthy person. This meant that butlers have often been fairly powerful and influential people, and sometimes even had a manservant or two of their own.

(Also, fun fact: Mary Roberts Rinehart, the early 20th century mystery writer who is widely credited with popularizing the whole ‘the butler did it’ trope was nearly murdered by one of her own servants, a chef whom she had passed over for promotion to butler. He came at her with a pistol, but it jammed, allowing her chauffeur time to wrestle it away and restrain him.)

You didn’t answer the key question things brings up: did she popularize the trope before or after the would-be butler tried to kill her?

according to wikipedia, before

There’s something glorious about the fact that the author who popularised “the butler did it” had a servant who a) failed to become the butler and then b) failed to do it.

If he’d been butler material, he’d have finished the job.